Coherence

//kəʊˈhɪəɹ.ən(t)s// noun

noun ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

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

    "His arguments lacked coherence."

  2. 2
    logical and orderly and consistent relation of parts wordnet
  3. 3
    The quality of forming a unified whole. countable, uncountable

    "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."

  4. 4
    the state of cohering or sticking together wordnet
  5. 5
    A logical arrangement of parts, as in writing. countable, uncountable

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

Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    The property of having the same wavelength and phase. countable, uncountable
  2. 7
    A semantic relationship between different parts of the same text. countable, uncountable

Synonyms

All synonyms
coherencyaccordaccordanceaccretionadherenceadhesion

Example

More examples

"We recognize coherence in texts."

Etymology

From Middle French coherence, from Latin cohaerentia. By surface analysis, cohere + -ence.

Related phrases

coherence timequantum coherence

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.