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incoherent

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,405 of 15,258neutral

Incoherent means not making connected sense. Incoherent rambling, an incoherent argument, incoherent with rage.

Of speech it means the words do not join up, which is a clinical sign as well as a criticism — sudden incoherence is a stroke warning. Of an argument it means the parts do not hang together, which is a different fault from being wrong. Note cohere, from the Latin for sticking together.

Definitions of incoherent

  1. 1adjectiveincoherentNot making connected sense.C1

    “He was so drunk that his speech was completely incoherent.”

incoherent is a quality of disconnection.

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    cohaerēns

  2. Middle French

    coherent

  3. English

    coherent

  4. English, today

    incoherent

From in- + coherent. coherent comes from Middle French coherent, from Latin cohaerēns. From Middle French coherent, from Latin cohaērēns, from co- + haereō. by surface analysis, cohere + -ent.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Word Building

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incoherent in the wild

  • The EISCAT Scientific Association exists to provide scientists with access to incoherent scatter radar facilities of the highest technical standard.

    EISCAT

  • The programme is remembered for a drunken, incoherent acceptance speech from Cole which concluded with a swear word.

    Logie Awards of 1973

  • Subsequently, the term elastic incoherent structure factor became more frequent.

    Lamb–Mössbauer factor

  • In the past many gharanas protected their bandishes from moving out of the family with gross incoherent vocal renditions.

    Bandish

  • The technique is realized using incoherent sources of radiation e.g.

    Incoherent broad-band cavity-enhanced absorption spectroscopy

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the coherent family

coherentincoherent

incoherent — used about once every 6,207 pages · #10,405 · point at the bar for the others