Piecemeal

Near-synonyms: piecewise, stepwise; see also Thesaurus:gradual

a piecemeal approach

But the copious and intertwined associative links warrant our accepting the former alternative: cyclamen—favourite flower—favourite food— artichokes; pulling to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase constantly ringing in our ears in relation to the piecemeal dismemberment of the Chinese Empire)—herbarium—bookworms, whose favourite food is books.

Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis, as various crises develop.

We should not underestimate European laypeople. They were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, particularly about death, a religious theme in which everyone had an investment and about which everyone was likely to have an opinion. There is no need to invoke the idea of systematic pagan survival to account for this: Europe’s mass Christianization had been a steady if piecemeal process from the sixth century through to the fourteenth.

“This takes us away from the piecemeal, bit by bit approach,” said Cathleen Curran Myers, the Pennsylvania representative on the basin commission.

The dictionaries themselves cover this additional lexis in what can best be described as a piecemeal fashion, with an obvious but unwarranted bias towards colonial era lexis.

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.