incoherent
Americanadjective
-
without logical or meaningful connection; disjointed; rambling.
an incoherent sentence.
- Synonyms:
- muddled, irrational, confused
-
characterized by such thought or language, as a person.
incoherent with rage.
-
not coherent or cohering.
an incoherent mixture.
-
lacking physical cohesion; loose.
incoherent dust.
-
lacking unity or harmony of elements.
an incoherent public.
-
lacking congruity of parts; uncoordinated.
-
different or incompatible by nature, as things.
-
Physics. (of a wave) having a low degree of coherence.
adjective
-
lacking in clarity or organization; disordered
-
unable to express oneself clearly; inarticulate
-
physics (of two or more waves) having the same frequency but not the same phase
incoherent light
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of incoherent
Explanation
Incoherent thoughts don't follow each other logically. Incoherent speech is mumbled or jumbled. Incoherent means that something is difficult to understand because it's not holding together. A lot of people use incoherent to mean unintelligible, which is a perfectly fine usage. But it specifically means unintelligible due to a lack of cohesion, or sticking together. An incoherent argument may sound something like this. "I deserve to go to the dance because it is the second Tuesday of the month and my feet are a size ten." The reasons do not follow each other logically and do not even relate. It's an incoherent mess.
Vocabulary lists containing incoherent
A Christmas Carol
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
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The Call of the Wild
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In those experiments, they used an LED, an incoherent light source, to produce polarization-entangled photons.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 8, 2026
The agents also hallucinated reams of incoherent commands and text and were sloppy and did not cover their tracks well.
From BBC ● Jul. 28, 2026
The suspect had made "incoherent statements", Nunez said, warning however against jumping to conclusions as to his motives.
From Barron's ● Jul. 27, 2026
Even Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union attempted the turn toward markets under perestroika, though that effort was, as economists have noted, too incoherent to produce results before the state itself dissolved.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 7, 2026
James Jackson actually made menacing faces at the Quakers in the gallery, called them outright lunatics, then launched into a tirade so emotional and incoherent that reporters in the audience had difficulty recording his words.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
