One way to picture it: the pieces hold on to each other — Latin cohaerēre, 'to together'. Because they hold, someone on the outside can follow the whole thing as one.
From the word’s history
Latin cohaerēre = con- ('together') + haerēre ('to stick, cling'); coherent literally describes something whose parts are clinging together.
拉丁文 cohaerēre 由 con-（一起）和 haerēre（黏住）組成，coherent 字面上就是「各部分黏著的」。現代三個用法都還在這個畫面上，只是黏著的對象不同。
Wiktionary etymology tree supplied in payload (Latin cohaereō < con- + haereō → cohaerēns → Middle French coherent)
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。
原始詞典資料10 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。
coherentadj/kəʊˈhɪə.ɹənt/
- 1
Unified; sticking together; making up a whole.
- These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe.
- A sentence like this one cannot be understood unless somehow we can store the underlined words for several seconds, while we wait for the rest of the sentence to arrive, with the information needed to complete a coherent thought.
- 2
Orderly, logical and consistent.
- At present she is unable to give any coherent account of the past, and the doctors hold out no hopes of the reestablishment of her reason.
- Perhaps Khrushchev did have a coherent plan in mind at the time he placed the nuclear missiles in Cuba.
- 3
Aesthetically ordered.
- 4
Having a natural or due agreement of parts; harmonious: a coherent design.
- 5
natural-sciencesphysical-sciencesphysicsOf waves having the same direction, wavelength and phase, as light in a laser.
- 6
biologybotanynatural-sciencesAttaching or pressing against an organ of the same nature.
- 7
mathematicssciencesBelonging to a specific class of sheaves having particularly manageable properties closely linked to the geometrical properties of the underlying space. See Coherent sheaf on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
- 8
mathematicssciencestopologyIn a technical sense, determined by the (topology of) the subsets. Formally, Such that 𝒯 is the finest topology on T for which the inclusion maps ιₐ:C_a→T are continuous, where each C_a is considered with its subspace topology.
另外 2 個記錄的用法
- 9
algebramathematicssciencesFinitely generated and such that all finitely generated submodules are finitely presented.
- 10
algebramathematicssciencesSuch that every finitely generated (left) ideal is finitely presented.
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。