Word.ws English Dictionary

piecewise

piecewise adverb: in terms or by means of pieces; a piece at a time. Also the clipping of piecewise linear.

Adverb

piecewise (not comparable)

  1. In terms or by means of pieces; a piece at a time.
    • Near-synonyms: piecemeal, apiece
    • One could even do the recount piecewise, starting with the most questionable regions.2006 August 13, “LETTERS; Practical Method for Mexican Vote Recount”, in Los Angeles Times
    Synonyms:
    piecemeal, apiece
  2. (especially) Throughout separate parts, but not necessarily throughout the whole.
    • automatic reconstruction of accurate, concise, piecewise smooth surface models from scattered range data1994 July 24, Hugues Hoppe, Tony DeRose, Tom Duchamp, Mark Halstead, Hubert Jin, John McDonald, Jean Schweitzer, Werner Stuetzle, “Piecewise smooth surface reconstruction”, in Proceedings of the 21st...
    • theory of piecewise differentiable functions and, specifically, piecewise differentiable equations2012, Stefan Scholtes, Introduction to Piecewise Differentiable Equations (SpringerBriefs in Optimization), New York: Springer, →ISBN

Adjective

piecewise (not comparable)

  1. Defined by subfunctions and subdomains
    • Our formula is not defined as a piecewise function, but rather as a single closed-form expression2018 April 1, Ivan Matić, Radoš Radoičić, Dan Stefanica, “A sharp Pólya-based approximation to the normal cumulative distribution function”, in Applied Mathematics and Computation, volume 322, →DOI...
    • is a piecewise function but not a PLQ function2019 September 1, Deepak Kumar, Yves Lucet, “Computation of the Epsilon-Subdifferential of Convex Piecewise Linear-Quadratic Functions in Optimal Worst-Case Time”, in Set-Valued and Variational...

Also used as

piecewise is also the clipping of piecewise linear.

Examples of piecewise in a sentence

  • piecewise linear model which can serve as the base of any other2013 March 9, Domine Leenaerts, Wim M. G. van Bokhoven, Piecewise Linear Modeling and Analysis, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN:
  • a piecewise function that consists of a single quadratic term and a constant term2022, Ethan T. Wang, “Efficient Quantum State Preparation for the Cauchy Distribution Based on Piecewise Arithmetic”, in IEEE Transactions...

Synonyms of piecewise

Origin of piecewise

From piece + -wise.

Words formed from piecewise

Questions about piecewise

What does piecewise mean?
Piecewise means in terms or by means of pieces; a piece at a time.
How do you use piecewise in a sentence?
piecewise linear model which can serve as the base of any other
What part of speech is piecewise?
Piecewise can be an adverb or an adjective.

Words near piecewise in the dictionary

  1. pieces out
  2. pieces to camera
  3. pieces together
  4. pieces up
  5. pieceth
  6. piecewise
  7. piecewise function
  8. piecewise linear
  9. piecewise smooth
  10. piecewise-defined
  11. piecewise-linear

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: piecewise (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “piecewise.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/piecewise. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.