incoherent
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Forms: form: more incoherent
form: most incoherent
form: incohærent
Etymology: From in- + coherent.
Senses: examples: text: When we confronted her, she gave us a hasty, incoherent explanation.
text: After just a few drinks, he becomes incoherent.
text: By which thus still ouermuch busying your selfe in matters passing your skill, it maketh you so forgetfull, that oftentimes you are faine to vtter matters incoherent, and much contradictorie.
ref: 1599, Ralph Brooke, A Discouerie of Certaine Errours Published in Print in the Much Commended Britannia, London, page 35:
text: 1765, William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses, London: A. Millar and J. and R. Tonson, 4th edition, Volume 3, Book 4, Section 4, p. 103, note z,
[…] this historian of men and manners goes on in the same rambling incoherent manner […]
text: […] the big dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent.
ref: 1908, Henry James, chapter XV, in The Portrait of a Lady (The Novels and Tales of Henry James; III), New York edition, volume I, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC; republished as The Portrait of a Lady (EBook #2833), United States: Project Gutenberg, 1 September 2001:
text: It was as if he was in fear of being swamped, rendered incoherent, by the sheer marvelousness of what he was relating.
ref: 1980, Barry Unsworth, Pascali’s Island, Penguin, published 1988, page 154:
text: The historian […] is a sort of novelist, but one who instead of inventing plot and character is obliged to discover them; who instead of setting characters in motion against one another with foreknowledge of their natures and destinies tries to guess at what often incoherent characters were up to amid a distraction of lies and suppressions.
ref: 2002, Julian Barnes, chapter 1, in Something to Declare, New York: Knopf, page 10:
glosses: Not coherent.
Not making logical sense; not logically connected or consistent.
examples: text: […] Some hasty and undigested Thoughts, on a Subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next Meeting, gave the first entrance into this Discourse, which having been thus begun by Chance, was continued by Intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resum'd again, as my Humour or Occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement, where an Attendence on my Health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.
ref: 1690, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London: Thomas Basset, The Epistle to the Reader:
text: That Sand-Stone does not still consolidate: i.e. that Matter which was, a few Years ago, lax, incoherent, and in form of Earth, or of Sand, does not become daily more hard and consistent, and by little and little acquire a perfect Solidity, and so turn to Stone; as others have asserted.
ref: 1695, John Woodward, An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, London: Richard Wilkin, Part 2, p. 110:
text: […] sooner, may all the Material World crumble into Incoherent Atoms, or relapse into the Abyss of Nothingness, than that any Conclusion, thus deduced, can be False […]
ref: 1696, John Sergeant, The Method to Science, London, Book 3, pp. 228-229:
glosses: Not coherent.
Not holding together physically; loose; unconnected.
examples: text: At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.
ref: 1888, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, published 1906, page 25:
text: […] because I am an American writer my subject and my material inevitably has to be a handful of incoherent people in an incoherent country.
ref: 1961, James Baldwin, James Baldwin: Collected Essays, New York: Library of America, published 1998, page 223:
text: I was glad, now, to be out of Karhide, an incoherent land driven towards violence by a paranoid, pregnant king and an egomaniac Regent.
ref: 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin, chapter 8, in The Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Ace, published 2010:
glosses: Not coherent.
Not cohering socially, not united.
Synonyms: uncoherent
unintelligible
unrelated
disjointed
desultory
jerky
disconnected
discontinuous
Derived terms: incoherency
incoherentness
Related terms: incoherence
incoherently