piecemeal
When you do something piecemeal, you're doing it little by little, but in a seemingly random way, with no order or system.
Say you're a computer geek and someone calls you desperate to find out how to fix a computer that's just crashed. If you respond piecemeal to the caller's questions, she'll have to call you back many times to get all the information she needs to get the computer up again. You may like to talk to her, but she's not going to be impressed with your computer smarts.
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one thing at a timesynonyms: bit-by-bit, in small stages, step-by-step, stepwisegradualproceeding in small stages
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a little bit at a time“the research structure has developed piecemeal”synonyms: bit by bit, in stages, little by little
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Vocabulary lists containing piecemeal
Most of these words are built from two common terms, and yet their meanings don't necessarily add up to what you'd expect. Even if you recognise and use these terms sometimes, do you know their origins and definitions?
Vocabulary from "Beowulf" (translated by by Gummere).
This collection of poetry reflects on more than a century's worth of American history, exploring a variety of topics including racism, the 1918 influenza pandemic, climate change, and the AIDS epidemic.