PLAY PODCASTS
inchmeal
Episode 4293

inchmeal

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day · Merriam-Webster

July 26, 20181m 31s

Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (rss.art19.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.

Show Notes

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 26, 2018 is:


inchmeal \ INCH-meel \ adverb

: little by little, gradually


Examples

"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."

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Topics

WEBSTERWORDSLANGUAGEMERRIAM-WEBSTERWORD A DAYWORD OF THE DAYWORDENGLISHMERRIAMVOCABULARYDICTIONARY