Occasionally

How to spell occasionally

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce occasionally

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does occasionally mean?

1. adverbFrom time to time; at irregular and infrequent intervals.

Occasionally in a sentence

• He occasionally works from home when the office is quiet.

• We occasionally treat ourselves to dinner at a nicer restaurant.

Where does occasionally come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun occasio, meaning an opportunity or a favourable moment, which was itself built on the verb occidere, 'to fall down' or 'to befall', from ob- ('toward, down') and cadere ('to fall'). The underlying image is of an event that 'falls' into place at a particular time, which is exactly why an 'occasion' is a moment when something happens. English took 'occasion' from Old French in the 1300s, and the adjective 'occasional' and then the adverb 'occasionally' grew up on English soil by stacking the familiar endings -al and -ly. The shared root cadere also gives us 'cadence', 'accident', and 'decay', all carrying that sense of falling. The spelling trap is purely about the consonants: the double c at the start comes from the assimilated Latin prefix, while there is only a single s and then a doubled l before the -y, so writers must resist the urge to double the s.

How the word is built

• oc- (variant of ob-: down, toward)
• cas (from Latin casus/cadere: to fall, happen)
• -ion (noun)
• -al (adjective)
• -ly (adverb)