unintelligibility

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Incoherence

Nouns

1. unintelligibility, incoherence; obscurity, ambiguity; uncertainty, intricacy, perplexity; confusion, disorder; mystification.

2. paradox, enigma, poser, mystery, riddle [of the Sphinx], [Chinese] puzzle (see secret); sealed book; cryptography, steganography, code, cipher; cacography (see writing); gibberish, jargon (see unmeaningness), Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, etc.

Verbs

1. pass comprehension; veil, obscure, obfuscate; confuse, perplex, mystify, speak in riddles.

2. not understand, lose [the clue], miss [the point]; not know what to make of, be able to make nothing of, give up; not be able to account for, not be able to make heads or tails of, be at sea; see through a glass darkly, not understand one another, work at cross purposes.

Adjectives

1. unintelligible, unaccountable, incomprehensible, inapprehensible, unrecognizable, unfathomable, fathomless, undiscoverable, inexplicable, inscrutable, impenetrable, unsolvable, meaningless; incoherent, irrational; illegible, undecipherable, unexplained, as Greek to one; enigmatic[al], paradoxical, puzzling, baffling, intricate. Informal, clear as mud.

2. inconceivable, beyond comprehension, beyond one's depth, over one'shead.

3. inarticulate, mumbled, confused. Slang, discombobulated.

Phrases — I don't understand; it's Greek to me.

Quotations — Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible (H. L. Mencken).

Antonyms, see meaning.