Word of the Day

: July 26, 2018

inchmeal

adverb INCH-meel

What It Means

: little by little, gradually

inchmeal in Context

"The big beam in the back room … came out with less trouble than Lydia had expected…. Cataracts of fine mortar dust fell continuously along most of its length as Lydia levered it inchmeal onto the cradle of scaffolding she had built." — Peter Dickinson, The Lively Dead, 1975

"Judy fights against her own body to accomplish the smallest tasks, fighting battles inchmeal in a war she'll never win." — Serena Donadoni, The Village Voice, 22 June 2018

Did You Know?

"All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him / By inch-meal a disease!" So goes one of the curses the hated and hateful Caliban hurls in the direction of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The origin of inchmeal is simple; the inch half is the familiar measurement, and the meal is the suffix we know from the more common word piecemeal (which shares the "gradually" meaning of inchmeal, and has several other meanings as well). An old suffix that means "by a (specified) portion or measure at a time," -meal is related to the modern German word mal, meaning "time," as in the German word manchmal, meaning "sometimes."