Apiece means for each one. Two apiece, a pound apiece, they scored twice apiece.
It comes after the amount rather than before it: three apiece, not apiece three. It is chiefly used with prices and scores, and in sports reporting it is standard — a goal apiece, two wickets apiece. Each is the everyday equivalent and works in the same position. Note that apiece is written as one word, and that a piece as two words means a portion of something.
1adverbapieceFor each one.
“The farmer sold the puppies for a hundred pounds apiece.”
apiece is a word of distribution.
The word is a plus piece, from Old French pece, from a Gaulish word meaning a portion. It was written as two words for centuries and closed up in the sixteenth.
Proto-Celtic
*kʷezdis — piece, portion; quota
cel-gau
*pettyā
Latin
*pettia
Old French
pece
Middle French
piece
Anglo-Norman
pece
Middle English
a pece
English, today
apiece
Built from
a + piece, from Late Middle English a pece. Pece is derived from Anglo-Norman pece, peece, peice, Middle French piece, and Old French pece, pice, piece (“part of a whole”) (modern French pièce); further etymology uncertain, possibly from Latin pettia, pettium (compare pecia, pecium, petia, petium (“broken piece, fragment; piece of land”)), or from their possible cel-gau pettyā, from Proto-Celtic kʷezdis (“piece, portion; quota”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA