whittle away

present singular third person whittles away · participle present whittling away · participle past whittled away · past whittled away

1. intransitivetransitiveTo drain away; to wear down or be slowly worn down.

   what little remained of his self-confidence was slowly whittling away

   4 more examples

   she sat in the living-room and cried most of the time, while Boo slowly whittled away all the furniture in the house

   1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

   A building will derank one level at a time as its hitpoints are whittled away. So, while it may seem that the life bar is at its end, attackers need to take into account if they are merely deranking the building by one or whether they have taken it down to Rank1 and are about to destroy the building.

   2003, John Henderson, BradyGames, & Danielle Vanderlip, Shadowbane Official Strategy Guide, →ISBN, page 295

   He hopes in time to 'whittle away at the scare quotes [around 'serious drama'], to unhedge the bets, and to justify the claim that the tradition of television drama I am concerned with is serious in particular ways'.

   2007, Janet McCabe, Kim Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond

   People like Dick Advocaat, who knew hee-haw about Scottish football's history, set about whittling away little bits of our tradition on the grounds... well, let's be honest, that they were an inconvenience.

   2010 September 27, Bill Leckie, The Scottish Sun