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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
sporadic
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
Sporadic gunfire continued through the night.
sporadic outbreaks of disease
▪ Our advertising campaigns have been too sporadic to have had a lot of success.
▪ Since then he has been on sporadic drinking binges.
▪ There was rioting and sporadic fighting in the city as rival gangs clashed.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Different patterns of clinical involvement with genetic transmission or sporadic occurrence are recognised.
▪ I kept hearing aircraft passing low overhead and sporadic gunfire from automatic weapons.
▪ Major cities hit by sporadic uprisings and riots.
▪ Secondly, familial cases have sometimes shown a lower age at onset than sporadic cases, which is consistent with aetiological heterogeneity.
▪ The next day the government declared a curfew from 9 p.m to 4 a.m., as sporadic rioting and shooting continued.
▪ The random background meteors that do not belong to discrete meteor showers are called sporadic meteors.
▪ There was now a lull in the battle, though sporadic cannon and musket fire were still heard.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sporadic

Sporadic \Spo*rad"ic\ (-r[a^]d"[i^]k), a. [Gr. ? scattered, fr. ?, ?, scattered, fr. ? to sow seed, to scatter like seed: cf. F. sporadique. See Spore.] Occurring singly, or apart from other things of the same kind, or in scattered instances; separate; single; as, a sporadic fireball; a sporadic case of disease; a sporadic example of a flower.

Sporadic disease (Med.), a disease which occurs in single and scattered cases. See the Note under Endemic, a.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
sporadic

1680s, from Medieval Latin sporadicus "scattered," from Greek sporadikos "scattered," from sporas (genitive sporados) "scattered, dispersed," from spora "a sowing" (see spore). Originally a medical term, "occurring in scattered instances;" the meaning "happening at intervals" is first recorded 1847. Related: Sporadical (1650s); sporadically.

Wiktionary
sporadic

a. 1 ''(archaic)'' (of diseases) occurring in isolated instances; not epidemic. 2 rare and scattered in occurrence.

WordNet
sporadic

adj. recurring in scattered and irregular or unpredictable instances; "a city subjected to sporadic bombing raids" [ant: continual]

Wikipedia

Usage examples of "sporadic".

No one had ever managed to infiltrate the top tier of the organization, and Silvestri had serious doubts that Lo Manto, despite his sporadic successes down the years, would be the first.

Thereafter matters degenerated into random and sporadic acts of violence followed by increasingly cruel reprisals which spread beyond Potcher to involve the eastern counties of Barfezi.

Earlier, Talman had shown a sporadic outburst, largely in self-protection.

But it is our firm conviction that the endemic form of criminality, insanity, and suicide will disappear, and that nothing will remain of them but rare sporadic forms caused by lesion or telluric and other influences.

Whatever victories had come for the Alabamian had been sporadic and without pattern.

Before the Ashura incident, attacks by Shiites against Israelis were sporadic and confined largely to tiny splinter factions.

This is where the street action lives: The bars, the hustlers, the drug market, the whores -- and also the riots, the trashings, killings, gassings, the sporadic bloody clashes with the hated, common enemy: The cops, the Pigs, the Man, that blue-crusted army of fearsome gabacho troops from the East L.

It was that thick gray chilly rain that sometimes grips the northeast in August and sends the children of summer colonies and beach towns into sporadic fits of Monopoly, bowling, Old Maid, hide-and-seek in the closets and the basements of houses pungent with damp, sends them finally to driving their parents crazy, until their mothers let them play in the rain as one last desperate diversion.

Brissaud shows the intimate relation between myxedema, endemic cretinism, sporadic cretinism, or myxedematous idiocy, and infantilism.

Figure 285 shows a case of myxedema, one of myxedema in a case of arrested development--a transition case between myxedema of the adult and sporadic cretinism--and a typical case of sporadic cretinism.

On the other hand, they give no account of nonphysical, purely qualitative, sporadic, and unique phenomena.

Fundabora still had sporadic contact with Manila, Palau, and Guam whenever trading ships happened by.

Challis developed his study more particularly with reference to the earlier evolution of Totemism, and he was able by his patient work among the Polynesians of Tikopia and Ontong Java, and his comparisons of those sporadic tribes with the Papuasians of Eastern New Guinea, to correct some of the inferences with regard to the origins of exogamy made by Dr.

It is the layered accumulation of successive, sporadic efforts, of timesaving, moneysaving slipshod shortcuts.

But many of the rebels fled, and carried on sporadic attacks, killing a number of Americans, then hiding in the mountains.