little by little

little by little

1. A small amount at a time.
   • 1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter LIX, in Great Expectations […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC:

     Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept this.

   • 1905, P. G. Wodehouse, chapter 13, in The Head of Kay's:

     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”, in New York Times, retrieved 22 November 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.

• “little by little”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.