Meanings
- A small amount at a time.
"[…]Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept this.[…]"
1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter XX, in Great Expectations […], volume III, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 3424 more examples
Little by little his head cleared, and he began once more to take a personal interest in the battle.
1905, P. G. Wodehouse, chapter 13, in The Head of Kay'sCos little by little / We gave you everything / You ever dreamed of. / Little by little / The wheels of your life / Have slowly fallen off.
2002, “Little by Little”, in Heathen Chemistry, performed by OasisIraq's government has been removing blast walls little by little since late 2008, trying to restore a semblance of normalcy to this bunker city.
2011 March 6, Jack Healy, “Baghdad Neighborhood Celebrates as a Wall Is Taken Away”, in New York Times, retrieved 22 Nov 2011What came instead over the following years were many of the same projects delivered individually to little-by-little add capacity.
2021 December 15, Philip Haigh, “Remaining ECML upgrades in the 'really difficult' category”, in RAIL, number 946, page 52
Synonyms & antonyms
adverba little bit at a time
adverbby a short distance
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Cite this entry
little by little. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/little%20by%20little
“little by little.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/little%20by%20little. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “little by little,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/little%20by%20little.
Source: little by little on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.