Word of the Day

: June 12, 2023

inchmeal

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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.”



Test Your Vocabulary

What is the meaning of the British English adjective wholemeal?

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