INCONGRUOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does incongruous mean? 

• INCONGRUOUS (adjective)
  The adjective INCONGRUOUS has 1 sense:

1. lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness

  Familiarity information: INCONGRUOUS used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• INCONGRUOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness

Context example:

a joke that was incongruous with polite conversation

Similar:

discrepant; inconsistent (not in agreement)

inappropriate; incompatible; out or keeping; unfitting (not in keeping with what is correct or proper)

inharmonious (lacking in harmony of parts)

ironic; ironical (characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is)

Antonym:

congruous (corresponding in character or kind)

Derivation:

incongruity; incongruousness (the quality of disagreeing; being unsuitable and inappropriate)

 Context examples 

Amongst them all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free, I—warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings of incongruous unions—would have asked to marry me.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Was it new for any thing in this world to be unequal, inconsistent, incongruous—or for chance and circumstance (as second causes) to direct the human fate?

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

I could just make out that he had a book as well as a knife in his hand, and was still wondering how anything so incongruous had come in their possession when the kneeling figure rose once more to his feet and the whole party began to move together towards the house.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

In this memorable year ’95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca—an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope—down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The whole setting was wild, and for the first time, regarding this strange woman and realizing how incongruous she was in it, I was aware of how much a part of it I was myself.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them all—kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

He was clothed with tatters of old ship's canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)