One way to picture it: parts that stick together instead of falling apart — the Latin root cohaerēre is literally 'to together'. When the pieces hold, you see one thing, not a pile.
From the word’s history
Latin cohaerēre = con- ('together') + haerēre ('to stick, cling'), so the modern noun still means 'the quality of clinging together'.
拉丁文 cohaerēre 是 con-（一起）＋ haerēre（黏住、附著），本義就是「黏在一起」。現代 coherence 用在文章或團體上時，說的仍然是同一件事：各部分之間有沒有黏住。
Wiktionary etymology tree supplied in payload (Latin cohaereō < con- + haereō)
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
coherencenoun/kəʊˈhɪəɹ.ən(t)s/
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 4
natural-sciencesphysical-sciencesphysicsThe property of having the same wavelength and phase.
- 5
human-scienceslinguisticssciencesA semantic relationship between different parts of the same text.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。