incoherent

comparative more incoherent · superlative most incoherent · alternative incohærent

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

      After just a few drinks, he becomes incoherent.

      5 more examples

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

      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.

      1599, Ralph Brooke, A Discouerie of Certaine Errours Published in Print in the Much Commended Britannia, London, page 35

      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 […]

      […] 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.

      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

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

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

   2. obsoleteNot holding together physically; loose; unconnected.

      […] 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 […]

      1696, John Sergeant, The Method to Science, London, Book 3, pp. 228-229

      2 more examples

      […] 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.

      1690, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London: Thomas Basset, The Epistle to the Reader

      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.

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

   3. Not cohering socially, not united.

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

      1888, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, published 1906, page 25

      2 more examples

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

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

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

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

plural Incoherents

1. historicalA member of a short-lived satirical and irreverent French art movement founded by Parisian writer and publisher Jules Lévy in 1882.