A genus of European owls

Usage examples of asio.

There was an occasional shout or obscenity from the jockeys and strappers as a horse played up, but the morning was too cold for any sustained burst of temper.

Last night, lying awake in the strange bed, a huge bed that could have accommodated four people and so had an increased emptiness, reaching out on one occasion for the Orville who wasn't there, who would never be there again, there had been a long moment when she had wondered at the worth of going on alone.

He was not so innocent as to be totally shocked by what had happened: hold-ups and the occasional killing occurred regularly in banks, or so it seemed these days.

Originally its rich black soil had been covered by thick timber, an ideal hide-out for convicts escaping from the colony, a haunt for footpads preying on the occasional traveller heading south, and a camping ground for roving Aborigines who killed the convicts and the footpads as fair game.

Homosexuality occasionally raises its airy-fairy head but, like voting Labor, it is not considered socially acceptable.

McDonald's and Pizza Hut have invaded the region, but they are looked upon as unavoidable social necessities, like regimental brothels in other invasions elsewhere.

They took Joanna down to her hire car, shook hands with her, recognizing that she was not one for the social peck on the cheek, not on a first occasion.

But it was a question Malone had asked on other occasions about other killers and, despite what criminal psychologists might tell him, he had never found a true answer.

Nothing ever fell out of the sky, although occasionally a psycho wandered in with all the questions answered before they had been asked.

It was quiet, except for the gentle cooing of pigeons and the occasional flit of swallows leaving their nests in the rafters to hunt insects in the evening air.

Glancing over the parapet to check the river, I saw the normally swift, deep waters were slowed to a trickle between a series of pools, still except for the occasional trout rising for a fly.

As representatives of the imperialist `Yanquis' and `Britannicos', the other students spared us no quarter in the spirited and occasionally fierce classroom debates.

At about 2100 the DS would brief us on the night march, done in pairs, as the risk of navigating through the craggy mountain ranges in darkness was too great - candidates had occasionally died of exposure or made navigational errors and walked off cliffs.

Having had no previous experience of the army, even the most basic infantry skills were new to me: field survival, escape and evasion, long-range reconnaissance patrol techniques, dog evasion, abseiling from helicopters, foreign weapon familiarisation.

He spent hours on the phone, mostly chatting to friends organising expensive parties and occasionally to clients whom he oleaginously addressed as `Sir'.