incoherent
/ɪnkə(ʊ)ˈhɪər(ə)nt
/adjective
1(Of spoken or written language) expressed in an incomprehensible or confusing way; unclear: he screamed some incoherent threat...
- Natural language is incoherent, and its underlying sensible structure is that of an infinite hierarchy of levels.
- Much of the rest of the e-mail is rambling, incoherent, badly written, nonsensical, fanciful, and downright unbelievable.
- Williams subsided over his beer, muttering some kind of incoherent threat, as Leslie smiled.
Synonyms
unclear, confused, muddled, unintelligible, incomprehensible, hard to follow, disjointed, disconnected, unconnected, disordered, mixed up, garbled, jumbled, scrambled;
rambling, wandering, discursive, disorganized, uncoordinated, illogical;
inarticulate, mumbled, muttered, stuttered, stammered, slurred
rare inchoate
1.1(Of a person) unable to speak intelligibly: he was incoherent with sentiment...
- But over time he is incoherent and contradictory.
- Although he is verbally incoherent due to heavy medication, John has worked solidly for the last 10 years on this collection of abstract paintings.
- He is too incoherent to tell and we leave him squatting outside the entrance to accident and emergency, smoking a roll-up and gobbing more blood on to the ground.
Synonyms
delirious, raving, babbling, hysterical, irrational
2Not logical or internally consistent: the film is ideologically incoherent...
- One of its key arguments is internally incoherent.
- I have not found that the ordinary logical mind has in either ancient or modern literature been able to find them internally incoherent.
- But the aim of fusion is both internally incoherent and impossible.
3 Physics (Of waves) having no definite or stable phase relationship.This means that coherent spin waves will appear below the temperature at which magnetic ordering sets in, while a transverse incoherent component will exist above....
- Similarly, the blue structural colors of avian skin were long hypothesized to be produced by incoherent Rayleigh or Tyndall scattering.
- We present elastic and inelastic incoherent neutron scattering data from a series of trehalose glasses diluted with glycerol.
Derivatives
incoherency
- They get suckered into the incoherency and think it's pure brilliance, when in reality, it's a waste of two hours.
- He only got this job because we mistook his incoherencies and vagueness for nerves.
- The trouble is that one is likely to think either that there is no plausible general argument in favor of the existence of such processes or that there is some logical incoherency in the very idea of them.
incoherently
/ adverb ...- I am, as usual, dog tired and my back has been absolutely killing me over the last few days, so I'm going to go lie down and moan incoherently.
- I tend to get extremely nervous when speaking in public, so it will be a rare opportunity to see me sweat, shake, dribble incoherently and squeak a lot.
- I was having a hard time getting moving in the morning, so I was speaking pretty slowly and incoherently, for a little bit.