See fits and starts in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"text": "Progress in this project has come in fits and starts.",
"type": "example"
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"ref": "1681, John Dryden, Epilogue for ‘The King's House’, lines 1–2:",
"text": "We act by fits and starts, like drowning men,\nBut just peep up, and then pop down again.",
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"ref": "1811 December, [Leigh Hunt], “Art. X.—The Feast of the Poets.”, in [Leigh Hunt], editor, The Reflector, […], volume II, number IV, London: […] John Hunt, […] sold by J. Carpenter, […], →OCLC, page 314:",
"text": "T'other day as Apollo sat pitching his darts, / Through the clouds of November, by fits and by starts, / He began to consider how long it had been, / Since the bards of Old England a session had seen.",
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"ref": "1841, Charles Dickens, chapter 2, in Master Humphrey's Clock:",
"text": "I spent the night in fits and starts, getting up and lying down full twenty times, and dreaming the same dream over and over again.",
"type": "quote"
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{
"ref": "1955 December 26, “Old Play in Manhattan”, in Time:",
"text": "It is a stammered, sleazy chronicle, told by fits and starts in bits and pieces, and constantly interrupted by the director and actors.",
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"text": "2007, \"Australian Premier vows troops pullout,\" Gulf Daily News (Bahrain), 22 Dec.,\nPaying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in fits and starts undermines US military planning and risks the gains made by US troops."
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"(idiomatic) Activity which is intermittent, variable in intensity, and prolonged by interruptions."
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Download raw JSONL data for fits and starts meaning in English (3.0kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-11-21 using wiktextract (95d2be1 and 64224ec). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.