Word of the Day

: June 12, 2023

inchmeal

adverb INCH-meel

What It Means

Something done inchmeal is done gradually, or little by little.

// They worked on the study guide inchmeal up until the exam.

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inchmeal in Context

“Dawn climbs inchmeal, the sky suffused with light so extravagant it seems stolen.” — Richard Bangs, HuffPost, 8 Aug. 2013

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 half, which means “by a (specified) portion or measure at a time,” is the suffix we know from inchmeal’s much more common synonym piecemeal. Students of German may be interested to know that -meal is related to the modern German word mal, meaning “time,” which features in the common term manchmal, meaning “sometimes.”