Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To put out of joint; dislocate.
  • intransitive verb To take apart at the joints.
  • intransitive verb To destroy the coherence or connections of.
  • intransitive verb To separate; disjoin.
  • intransitive verb To come apart at the joints.
  • intransitive verb To become dislocated.
  • adjective Having no elements in common. Used of sets.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To separate or disconnect the joints or joinings of.
  • To break the natural order and relations of; pat out of order; derange.
  • To fall in pieces.
  • Disjointed; disjunct; separated.
  • noun A difficult situation; disadvantage.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete Difficult situation; dilemma; strait.
  • transitive verb To separate the joints of; to separate, as parts united by joints; to put out of joint; to force out of its socket; to dislocate
  • transitive verb To separate at junctures or joints; to break where parts are united; to break in pieces
  • transitive verb To break the natural order and relations of; to make incoherent.
  • adjective Disjointed; unconnected; -- opposed to conjoint.
  • intransitive verb To fall in pieces.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective not smooth or continuous; disjointed
  • adjective set theory (not used in the comparative or superlative) Of two or more sets, having no members in common; having an intersection equal to the empty set.
  • verb To render disjoint; to remove a connection, linkage, or intersection.
  • verb To fall into pieces.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb separate at the joints
  • verb become separated, disconnected or disjoint
  • verb part; cease or break association with
  • adjective having no elements in common
  • verb make disjoint, separated, or disconnected; undo the joining of

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English disjointen, to destroy, ultimately from Old French desjoint, past participle of desjoindre, to disjoin; see disjoin.]

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Examples

  • (Of course Haeckel's implication that the set of believing minds & that of scientific minds are disjoint is false.)

    When Mixing Science and Theology is OK 2005

  • A new technical term disjoint marks the apparent difference between (A) and (B).

    Determinates vs. Determinables Sanford, David H. 2006

  • The training sets are both larger and partially disjoint from the testing collections.

    Boing Boing: November 24, 2002 - November 30, 2002 Archives 2002

  • It’s worth noting that there’s a certain disjoint between the decades-long trend in wages and the trend in income.

    Matthew Yglesias » The Wage Stagnation Debate 2010

  • The phrase is also often connected to completely random, illogical additions to the show, such as plots that are completely disjoint from the past or characters that don’t fit in.

    EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson - The real Jump the Shark video 2007

  • There's a moment in writing presentations; you are dispassionately writing and editing point-form notes about the things you want to talk about, a kind of disjoint series of ideas that you know all fit together somehow, and you're really just playing with them to see how they fit, then you take a bit of time off to help someone on IRC and you come back to it.

    Planet Python 2010

  • There's a moment in writing presentations; you are dispassionately writing and editing point-form notes about the things you want to talk about, a kind of disjoint series of ideas that you know all fit together somehow, and you're really just playing with them to see how they fit, then you take a bit of time off to help someone on IRC and you come back to it.

    Planet Python 2010

  • But the story seems disjoint enough that I wonder if it was chopped up and stitched back together in different order.

    Archive 2009-06-01 2009

  • I see in public policy debates, as well as educational settings, that the desire to present a coherent collection of evidence is instead interpreted as disjoint examples.

    William E. J. Doane PhD › Exploit Parallelism 2010

  • CONS: Plot is wildly disjoint, and strangely most characters are uninteresting and unimportant.

    REVIEW: Stardust by Neil Gaiman 2009

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