The word piecemeal means bit by bit. If you pay back a debt piecemeal, you repay it a little at a time. The -meal in piecemeal is an old term that means a measure of time or a specified portion. In Middle English, this element appears in several words, such as littlemeal, meaning little by little; pennymeal, meaning penny by penny; and dropmeal, meaning drop by drop. They’re all the etymological kin of the term meal, meaning a fixed portion of time for eating food. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The “Meal” in Piecemeal”
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You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Grant, you know the term piecemeal, right?
Yeah.
It means piece by piece.
You do something piecemeal.
Somebody pays you back piecemeal.
It’s piece by piece.
A little bit at a time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so the piece is self-explanatory, but what about the meal?
Oh.
I will tell you because I just found out this week and it made me so excited.
Meal is an old suffix that means by a specified portion or a measure at a time.
Oh.
And in Middle English, there were lots of different versions of this.
Peace meal is the one that survived.
Right.
But there was also little meal, which meant little by little.
I’m going to do something little meal.
Or penny meal, which is I’m going to pay you penny by penny.
Drop meal, I really love.
There was a reference in a 17th century text that goes, as the cloud dissolves drop meal upon the earth.
Isn’t that beautiful?
So drop meal means?
Drop by drop.
Drop by drop.
How about that?
And does this mean that the meal in peace meal is related to the meal?
Like sitting down for a meal?
Yeah, yeah.
Again, it’s a space of time.
It’s an occasion of taking food.
Oh, so they have the same etymological origin.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Well, you know, the language is really interesting, and it has deep histories for us and a lot of things that we’ve never imagined.
If you’ve got questions about something, toss them our way.
We’ll try to answer them and see what we can uncover.
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