intermittent

adj

1. Stopping and starting, occurring, or presenting at intervals; coming after a particular time span.

   “The day was cloudy with intermittent rain.”

   “Intermittent bugs are most difficult to reproduce.”

   “Also bloudletting is good in feuers, whether they be continual or intermittent […]”

   “[…] the Gift of Prophecy […] was in the mind not as an Inhabitant, but as a Guest; that is, by intermittent Returns and Ecstasies, by Occasional Raptures and Revelations; as is clear from what we read of the Prophets in the Old Testament.”

   “[…] Pale through night’s curtain gleam’d By fits the lunar intermittent ray, That quiv’ring serv’d to light his lonely steps”

2. (specifically)Existing only for certain seasons; that is, being dry for part of the year.

   “The area has many intermittent lakes and streams.”

noun

1. (dated)An intermittent fever or disease.

   “Feuers, and especially those that are called intermittents, discontinuing agues, euen naturally at the beginning and their first inuasion, cause vomits: and at the declining, sweats.”

   “The Bark, which had been ineffectual in the Intermittents of the former Year, was successful in this.”

   “In disease, the agency of this system of vessels is an object of attentive study with the pathologist. To its influence in inflammation, we have already alluded; but it is no less exemplified in the more general diseases of the frame, as in the cold, hot, and sweating stages of an intermittent.”