sporadic
The security door buzzed sporadically as residents came and went.
They met at a nightclub and began dating sporadically .
They kept in touch sporadically until 2005.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Frequency & regularity - general words
(as) regular as clockworkidiom
-ly
clockwork
endemically
erratic
erratically
fitful
irregular
irregularity
irregularly
like clockworkidiom
many
on and offidiom
on-off
periodic
periodically
prevalence
religiously
unsynchronized
would

Examples of sporadically

sporadically
The new observations suggested that liquid water might be present, albeit sporadically, on the surface and that water still shapes the surface of the planet.
Furthermore, petitions, correspondence, surveys and communal accounts also survive sporadically for the villages that fell within the wider administrative district.
Information on artists and materials is given sporadically.
However, fauna and flora have their own limitations, particularly when they are sporadically distributed.
By the end of the century, however, the construction becomes increasingly less common and is found only sporadically in a handful of texts.
One ad that appeared sporadically for decades was an image of the father at the dinner table with his wife and children gathered to eat.
Small amounts of calcite and dolomite can appear sporadically in silica xenoliths, but are more common in calc-silicate xenoliths.
This had been spoken and written about sporadically over previous decades but sprang into prominence in the 1950s.
Support from different sources was highly valued but was reported to be provided inconsistently and sporadically.
Research on this concept has continued sporadically since that time.
It is not just an ideal, but a very real possibility, and one which is sporadically fulfilled.
This suggests that a regime of increasing accommodation was required to form well-developed reefs, though reefs also occur sporadically in highstand systems tract settings.
In contrast, the father appears as a knight in shining armor, returning home sporadically from exciting events outside.
In the first years they had corresponded quite intensely, but later more sporadically.
The next two results show that totally free matroids cannot occur sporadically in a minor-closed class.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.