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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
discontinuous
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Psychotic illness itself is frequently a discontinuous event and mostly inimical to organised thought.
▪ Somehow, a continuous process-natural selection-has given rise to discontinuous entities called species.
▪ The discontinuous change constitutes a scientific revolution.
▪ The wave can not be discontinuous.
▪ Yet others had correctly calculated that they were too old or their employment patterns too discontinuous to be eligible for pensions.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Discontinuous

Discontinuous \Dis`con*tin"u*ous\, a.

  1. Not continuous; interrupted; broken off.

    A path that is zigzag, discontinuous, and intersected at every turn by human negligence.
    --De Quincey.

  2. Exhibiting a dissolution of continuity; gaping. ``Discontinuous wound.''
    --Milton.

    Discontinuous function (Math.), a function which for certain values or between certain values of the variable does not vary continuously as the variable increases. The discontinuity may, for example, consist of an abrupt change in the value of the function, or an abrupt change in its law of variation, or the function may become imaginary.

Wiktionary
discontinuous

a. 1 having breaks or interruptions; intermittent 2 (context mathematics English) having at least one discontinuity

WordNet
discontinuous
  1. adj. of a function or curve; possessing one or more discontinuities [ant: continuous]

  2. not continuing without interruption in time or space; "discontinuous applause"; "the landscape was a discontinuous mosaic of fields and forest areas"; "he received a somewhat haphazard and discontinuous schooling" [syn: noncontinuous] [ant: continuous]

Usage examples of "discontinuous".

Yet he glanced repeatedly from side to side, blinking at the view-more severe than the Ransoniville countryside, the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains were higher, more broken and discontinuous than that terrain.

That he must undergo sexual reassignment surgery, that he must make his male genitals disappear, demonstrates that male and female, and thus sexual identity, are factual and discontinuous.

We must deduce that regular musical rhythms and discontinuous musical melodies are super-stimuli for parts of the brain that are designed to process irregular speech rhythms and continuous speech melodies.

There are aspects of evolution that are perfectly continuous, and aspects that are quantized or discontinuous, and emphasizing exclusively one or the other leads to pathological heterarchy and pathological hierarchy, respectively.

There is no way to explain the discontinuous appearance of stone tools unless the Australopithecines had educational institutions.

We move, as McLuhan says, into a space that has become audile-tactile instead of visual: interactive, simultaneous, heterogeneous, discontinuous, multidirectional, diversely textured.

In a plenum conceived as a static grid of relationships, a 'violation' of that 'law' is nothing more startling than a discontinuous function, to be noted and described.

As the strangers got out of their flitters, they seemed to be moving in unconnected and discontinuous motions.

The principles of the hyperdrive are difficult enough, involving as they do the concept of multiple dimensions and of discontinuous psi functions.

The vortex then became an intersection point, a discontinuous quantum jump, beyond relativistic space-time.

Such starquakes should produce a discontinuous change in the period of rotation of the neutron star.

In the ultimate analysis, the world of Nature was granular -discontinuous.

It can evolve continuously and predictably in time in the manner described by its differential wave equation, or alternatively, it can interact with the wave function of another object, such as when an electron interacts with a measuring instrument, in which case the change is discontinuous and the result will be one of a number of discrete possible outcomes, each with a given probability.

Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible -- wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr.