incoherent

• incohærent (archaic)

From in- +‎ coherent.

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incoherent (comparative more incoherent, superlative most incoherent)

1. Not coherent.
   1. Not making logical sense; not logically connected or consistent.

      When we confronted her, she gave us a hasty, incoherent explanation.

      After just a few drinks, he becomes incoherent.

      • 1599, Ralph Brooke, A Discouerie of Certaine Errours Published in Print in the Much Commended Britannia‎^[1], London, page 35:

        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.

      • 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,^[2]

        […] this historian of men and manners goes on in the same rambling incoherent manner […]

      • 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:

        […] 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.

      • 1980, Barry Unsworth, Pascali’s Island, Penguin, published 1988, page 154:

        It was as if he was in fear of being swamped, rendered incoherent, by the sheer marvelousness of what he was relating.

      • 2002, Julian Barnes, chapter 1, in Something to Declare‎^[3], New York: Knopf, page 10:

        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.

   2. (obsolete) Not holding together physically; loose; unconnected.
      • 1690, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding‎^[4], London: Thomas Basset, The Epistle to the Reader:

        […] 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.

      • 1695, John Woodward, An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies‎^[5], London: Richard Wilkin, Part 2, p. 110:

        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.

      • 1696, John Sergeant, The Method to Science‎^[6], London, Book 3, pp. 228-229:

        […] 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 […]

   3. Not cohering socially, not united.
      • 1888, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore, Manifesto of the Communist Party‎^[7], Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, published 1906, page 25:

        At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.

      • 1961, James Baldwin, James Baldwin: Collected Essays, New York: Library of America, published 1998, page 223:

        […] because I am an American writer my subject and my material inevitably has to be a handful of incoherent people in an incoherent country.

      • 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin, chapter 8, in The Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Ace, published 2010:

        I was glad, now, to be out of Karhide, an incoherent land driven towards violence by a paranoid, pregnant king and an egomaniac Regent.

• uncoherent
• unintelligible
• unrelated
• disjointed
• desultory
• jerky
• disconnected
• discontinuous

• coherent

• incoherence
• incoherently

From in- +‎ coherent.

• IPA^(key): (Central) [iŋ.ku.əˈɾen]
• IPA^(key): (Balearic) [iŋ.ko.əˈɾent]
• IPA^(key): (Valencia) [iŋ.ko.eˈɾent]
• Rhymes: -ent

incoherent m or f (masculine and feminine plural incoherents)

1. incoherent

• incoherentment

incoherent m or n (feminine singular incoherentă, masculine plural incoherenți, feminine and neuter plural incoherente)

1. Alternative form of incoerent