on and off
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Intermittently or at irregular intervals
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
không liên tục hoặc ở khoảng thời gian không đều
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: continuously and then not
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
‘ Oh — for about four years, on and off,’ he said vaguely.
I've been smoking on and off like a chimney
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “on and off” mean?
Intermittently or at irregular intervals Literally: continuously and then not
Is “on and off” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.