Definition
Incoherent is an adjective that describes something that is unclear or difficult to understand due to a lack of organization or logical structure.
Pronunciation
US English
UK English
See Synonyms, Antonyms and Usage
Excerpts from News Articles
"It's wild and it's messy and imperfect, but incredibly powerful," said film and theater star Oscar Isaac, who plays Sidney Brustein, the intellectual whose life and marriage unravel. "The wildness of it and the, at times, the incoherent way that the motivations – or seemingly lack of motivation – occurs with the characters ... feels so true to life."
Von der Leyen's speech, which Beijing criticised as incoherent and misleading, offered a blunt, and at times scathing, assessment of the current state of EU-China relations, name-checking the Communist Party for promoting an "alternative vision of the world order."
Trump placed the blame for all the economic ills of his country on China, started a trade war of sorts, and pushed the world's largest economy into a protectionist pit. The scapegoat that Trump provided in the form of China came in handy. He was able to hide his inability to revive the American economy as the public remained distracted by an aggressive, yet incoherent foreign policy.
The explosive filings in the Dominion Voting Systems’ {$}1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox help explain these incoherent gyrations. The internal emails and text messages Dominion amassed show Rupert Murdoch’s personal disillusionment with Trump over his election fraud lies. Soon after Election Day, the Fox News co-founder and Fox Corp. chairman privately described Trump as “increasingly mad” and predicted that he would “be becoming irrelevant” and Fox could move on from backing him.
Trump returned to Florida and said something about being indicted. I didn’t watch since, I’m sure, he went on and on and on with his imbecilic, school-yard taunts and incoherent , recycled tirade against his “deep-state” enemies.
But the fundamentals that thwarted her in the past — the two-round system, her incoherent economic program and her past ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin — remain largely unchanged. That Macron is constitutionally barred from running again will also make her task harder, opening the 2027 field up to unexpected contenders — much like Macron was in 2017 — and to popular centrist politicians, such as former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe.
Indeed, the closer the Floridian comes to the presidential campaign, the more ridiculous he becomes. In recent weeks, DeSantis has been incoherent on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; he responded to Trump’s indictment with overt hostility toward the rule of law; he has waged a pointless crusade against his state’s largest employer; he has signed a wildly unpopular measure to weaken his state’s gun laws; and he has endorsed radical new restrictions on reproductive rights.
It didn’t help, Fried added, that the Trump administration’s policy toward Russia, though often tough, was “ incoherent ,” because President Donald Trump appeared to sympathize with Putin.
Unlike last cycle, when a bitter feud between McConnell and former National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Rick Scott led to an incoherent party strategy, the Kentucky Republican’s apparatus and the Senate GOP campaign chief appear to be rowing in the same direction this time. Committee Chair Steve Daines of Montana is “actively recruiting” Justice to run for Senate, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The best word to describe the way Australia taxes alcoholic drinks is “ incoherent ”.
Chatty central banks are a relatively new phenomenon. Until 1994, the U.S. Federal Reserve wouldn’t even announce its actions after a policy meeting, and instead relied on investors to notice changes in markets the next morning. Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan epitomized the central bank’s mute era, saying in 1987 that, since helming the Fed, he had learned to “mumble with great incoherence .”
“Because if you’re going to say the children have the sexual autonomy to change their gender, then how can you logically say they lack the sexual autonomy to have sex with an adult. You can’t, those things go against one another, it’s incoherent . It doesn’t make sense,” she added.
Pickett has revealed since then that Stewart had doubled the sample size while leaving out nearly three quarters of the counties polled, mangling the data to the point of incoherence , and had refused to turn over the raw data so that Pickett could re-run the calculations.
So while removing the ads from shirts is a welcome first step, it is incoherent to leave all else untouched. The English Football league will still be named after a betting firm, and all the non-Premier League clubs, most notably Rangers and Celtic, are unaffected. The ads won’t even be removed from Premier League shirts: they’ll still be on sleeves. So there’s a long road to travel.
On top of Carlson’s flawed argument that a sharecropper can’t be profound is a criticism of Pearson that’s unsurprisingly incoherent . “Black men in particular, and Black people in general, are supposed to be able to do opposite-ends-of-the-scale things,” Toni Morrison once argued.
The imperative, it seems, is to echo the supposed views of the so-called hero voters in seats Labour recently lost to the Tories, with any unease from leftwing faint-hearts cited as welcome proof that the leader is, to use his chosen word, “ruthless”. Meanwhile, tactics and strategy still seem woefully incoherent . Up until the recent spurt of crass anti-Sunak attack ads – defended over the weekend by the deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner as “no-nonsense” and “factual” – there was a drive to make Starmer’s lack of political experience an asset and portray him as a dutiful public servant uninterested in the usual Westminster games: now, he looks like the opposite.
Based on previous arrivals, we can assume that most of the migrants hope to make it to the United Kingdom or Germany, neither of which is keen to welcome them despite tight labor markets. That hostility is part of the incoherence of the European response.
To be fair, the entire speech was somewhat of an incoherent mess.
Our cheerily rotund town criers have morphed into faceless algorithms while the security measures set up to monitor ‘community safety’ have taken to snatching victims in the night, weeding out the strongest voices from the crowd to ensure society’s conversation remains directionless and incoherent .
When police officers arrived at the scene, Soo walked towards them while holding the knife and shouted incoherently . Despite the police ordering him to stop and drop the weapon, Soo continued to advance and suddenly charged towards one of the officers, who then shot him in the left arm.
That may help explain why OpenAI was the first to market with ChatGPT, and why Microsoft was quicker to incorporate a chatbot into search. And of course Google, as the incumbent, had more to lose if its flagship search engine were to be associated with the “hallucinations” — responses that are incoherent or unmoored from reality — that ChatGPT and Bing are prone to.
By the time Beau reaches his maybe-final destination, he can barely form full sentences. Phoenix’s performance — already a master class in cowering passivity — becomes mumblingly incoherent and inert. In its final half-hour, when the mind-and-body blows of “Beau Is Afraid” should be earned (if not explained), Aster reveals the film’s banal foundations: He’s made a film that’s so far up its own Aster-ness that it has reached the farthest — and ugliest — limits of a psyche consumed by good old Oedipal guilt and misogynistic rage.
"If your child is suddenly not communicating with you, difficult to arouse, incoherent , working really hard to breathe, those kinds of things, that's definitely a trip to go to the emergency room right away," Cappello said.
Walsh’s questions were straight forward, but their answers are not. They expose the intellectual incoherence at the heart of identity politics.
It was incoherent and ultimately ineffective. But as deeply odd as that messaging was, the Republican National Committee’s response to Biden’s newly announced re-election campaign seems quite a bit worse. Axios reported on Tuesday:
While often scientifically and factually incoherent , the segments played well with his older, white, conservative audience by deploying such themes as government overreach, tax hikes, liberal elites, and globalism.
Of course, one of the most obvious current examples of this incoherency is what many laugh about, but it is outrageous in its spirit. It is those who say, ‘We support women’ but who then will not define ‘woman’.
This test is absolutely not met. The conclusion of constitutional conservative lawyers like Greg Craven and Julian Leeser who denounce the model as ‘fatally flawed’ yet will vote and campaign for Yes is intellectually incoherent , elevating emotion above reason, and morally muddled, as on-fire James Allan wrote last week. The counterpoint to the Craven-Leeser sentiment is the first TV ad against the Voice from Fair Australia featuring Jacinta Price.