little by little
English
Adverb
little by little
- A small amount at a time.
- 1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter LIX, in Great Expectations […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, OCLC 3359935:
- Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept this.
- 1905, P. G. Wodehouse, The Head of Kay's, ch. 13:
- Little by little his head cleared, and he began once more to take a personal interest in the battle.
- 2002, “Little by Little”, in Heathen Chemistry, performed by Oasis:
- Cos little by little / We gave you everything / You ever dreamed of. / Little by little / The wheels of your life / Have slowly fallen off.
- 2011 March 6, Jack Healy, "Baghdad Neighborhood Celebrates as a Wall Is Taken Away," New York Times (retrieved 22 Nov 2011):
- Iraq's government has been removing blast walls little by little since late 2008, trying to restore a semblance of normalcy to this bunker city.
- 2021 December 15, Philip Haigh, “Remaining ECML upgrades in the 'really difficult' category”, in RAIL, number 946, page 52:
- What came instead over the following years were many of the same projects delivered individually to little-by-little add capacity.
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Synonyms
- bit by bit, incrementally, step by step, stepwise, footmeal, gradatim
Translations
a small amount at a time
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References
- “little by little”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.