intermit

present singular third person intermits · participle present intermitting · participle past intermitted · past intermitted

1. archaictransitiveTo interrupt, to stop or cease temporarily or periodically; to suspend.

   Pray to the gods to intermit the plague.

   1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Iulius Cæsar”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]

   2 more examples

   The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.

   1624, John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII., in The Works of John Donne, vol. 3, ed. Henry Alford, London: John W. Parker (1839), pp. 574-5

   Idleness[…]of body is nothing but a kind of benumbing laziness, intermitting exercise, which, if we may believe Fernelius, “[…] makes them unapt to do anything whatever.”

   1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], chapter I, in The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC, page 243