coherence
nounUK /kəʊˈhɪəɹ.ən(t)s/ · US /koʊˈhɪɹ.ən(t)s/
Etymology From Middle French coherence, from Latin cohaerentia. By surface analysis, cohere + -ence.
1
The quality of cohering, or being coherent; internal consistency.
- His arguments lacked coherence.
- Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went on: “That he’s an injury to the others.”1898, Henry James, chapter II, in The Turn of the Screw:
1 more example
- He would then put down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance, greater depth.1915, Virginia Woolf, chapter XXII, in The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth & Co., […], →OCLC:
2
The quality of forming a unified whole.
- When I come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am exasperated by the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal. To give my story coherence I should describe the progress of their tragic union, but I know nothing of the three months during which they lived together.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XLIII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
3
A logical arrangement of parts, as in writing.
- In a lesson on coherence in academic writing, students engaged in the following discussion on the online platform TodaysMeet.2017, Di Zou, James Lambert, “Feedback methods for student voice in the digital age”, in British Journal of Educational Technology, volume 48, number 5, page 1088:
4
Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Physics Of waves The property of having the same wavelength and phase.
5
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences, Translation studies A semantic relationship between different parts of the same text.
- Synonyms
- coherency
- Antonyms
- incoherence
- Derived terms
- anticoherence, autocoherence, bicoherence, coherence time, coherin, multicoherence, overcoherence, quantum coherence, recoherence, supercoherence, tricoherence, unicoherence
- Related terms
- cohesion