To piece together is to work out the whole from scattered bits. No single fragment tells you anything.
It splits round an object. Investigation is its natural home, since detectives piece together events and historians piece together a life from letters. There is a literal sense of reassembling something broken. The phrase always implies effort and incompleteness, so an account pieced together from witnesses is provisional by admission, which is why careful reporting uses it.
1phrasepiece togetherTo assemble an understanding of something from separate fragments.
“They had to piece together the evening from three accounts.”
Practised in Phrasal Verbs, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 16 of A Man Called Ove.
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