Continual means happening again and again over a period. Continual interruptions, continual complaints, continual rain.
The careful distinction is worth keeping: continual is repeated with breaks and continuous is unbroken, so continual rain stops and starts and continuous rain does not. Most people ignore it and continual is nearly always the one used for the annoying kind. Note that the Latin continuus means uninterrupted, which is the opposite of what the English word settled on.
1adjectivecontinualHappening again and again over a period.
“I can't get any work done with these continual interruptions from the phone.”
synonyms: repeated, recurrent
continual is a quality of repetition.
Old French continuel comes from Latin continuus, uninterrupted, from continere, to hold together. Continue and contain come from the same holding.
Latin
continuus — continuous
Old French
continuel
Middle English
continuel
English, today
continual
From Middle English continuel, from Old French continuel, formed from Latin continuus (“continuous”) with the suffix -el, equivalent to continue + -al.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA