- 1零敲碎打
If something happens piecemeal, it happens slowly, in bits, and not as one clear plan. A piecemeal repair of a road is a patch here and a patch there, with no full rebuild. A piecemeal change to a school rule is one small fix after another, not a new system. It can describe a thing (a piecemeal approach) or the way you do it (the work was done piecemeal). The feeling is often a little unhappy: the speaker thinks the bits do not add up, or that someone should have planned better. Though actually people also use it in a calmer way, just to mean “bit by bit” when doing the whole thing at once is too big. It is grown-up language, more news and office than playground, and it is not about food.
組成piece + an old ending -meal meaning “at a time,” from Old English mǣlum (“at a time / by measures”). It took the place of an older English word that already meant bit by bit, here and there, little by little. It is not a piece of a meal.
同家族的字
- piecethe piece in piecemeal is the ordinary word piece, a bit of something
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
piecemealadj/ˈpiːs.miːl/
- 1
Made or done in pieces or one stage at a time.
- Near-synonyms: piecewise, stepwise; see also Thesaurus:gradual
- a piecemeal approach
piecemealadv/ˈpiːs.miːl/
- 1
Piece by piece; in small amounts, stages, or degrees.
- It’s as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the hunting season.
- The Western Region route, by contrast, was built up piecemeal and was not shaped in its present form until 1910.
- 2
Into pieces or parts.
- Stoop villaine, ſtoop, ſtoope for ſo he bids, That may commaund thee peecemeale to be torne, Or ſcattered like the lofty Cedar trees. Strooke with the voice of thundring Iupiter.
- A few years ago also there was the case of Kate Webster, who at Richmond murdered her mistress, and, fiend-like, cut the body up piecemeal, and tried to dispose of it in various ways by small portions.
piecemealverb/ˈpiːs.miːl/
- 1
To divide or distribute piecemeal; dismember.
piecemealnoun/ˈpiːs.miːl/
- 1
A fragment; a scrap.
- Thus the world Is all to piecemeals cut
- The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more: the names only are left, and those (for many of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by piecemeals to decay.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。