coherence

• cohærence (archaic)

From Middle French coherence, from Latin cohaerentia.

Morphologically cohere +‎ -ence.

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Audio (US)

  (file)

coherence (countable and uncountable, plural coherences)

1. The quality of cohering, or being coherent; internal consistency.

   His arguments lacked coherence.

   • 1898, Henry James, chapter II, in The Turn of the Screw‎:

     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.”

   • 1915, Virginia Woolf, chapter XXII, in The Voyage Out, London: The Hogarth Press, published 1949, →OCLC:

     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.

2. The quality of forming a unified whole.
   • 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XLIII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:

     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.

3. A logical arrangement of parts, as in writing.
   • 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:

     In a lesson on coherence in academic writing, students engaged in the following discussion on the online platform TodaysMeet.

4. (physics, of waves) The property of having the same wavelength and phase.
5. (linguistics, translation studies) A semantic relationship between different parts of the same text.

   Coordinate term: cohesion

• incoherence

• cohesion

• Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “coherence”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

coherence f (uncountable)

1. coherence; quality of being internally consistent

• English: coherence
• French: cohérence