Idiom
now and then
Meaning
Synonym of occasionally, sometimes, intermittently.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I visit my parents now and then.”
“Although he prefers to walk, he takes the bus to work now and then when it rains.”
“The old lighthouse keeper would gaze out at the horizon, watching the distant ships pass by now and then as the seasons slowly turned.”
Examples
simple
“I visit my parents now and then.”
contextual
“Although he prefers to walk, he takes the bus to work now and then when it rains.”
complex
“The old lighthouse keeper would gaze out at the horizon, watching the distant ships pass by now and then as the seasons slowly turned.”
Origin
The expression corresponds to the Dutch *nu en dan* and the West Frisian *no en dan*. The construction preserves a Germanic syntactic pattern for indicating intermittent frequency.
Key words
Related idioms
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