Definitions

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

  • adjective Consisting of dissimilar elements or parts; not homogeneous. synonym: miscellaneous.
  • adjective Xenogeneic.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Different in kind; widely dissimilar; unlike; foreign; incongruous.
  • Composed of parts of different kinds; having widely unlike elements or constituents: opposed to homogeneous.
  • The attraction between the different kinds of electricity and magnetism.

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

  • adjective Differing in kind; having unlike qualities; possessed of different characteristics; dissimilar; -- opposed to homogeneous, and said of two or more connected objects, or of a conglomerate mass, considered in respect to the parts of which it is made up.
  • adjective (Gram.) nouns having different genders in the singular and plural numbers; as, hic locus, of the masculine gender in the singular, and hi loci and hæc loca, both masculine and neuter in the plural; hoc cælum, neuter in the singular; hi cæli, masculine in the plural.
  • adjective (Math.) such quantities as are incapable of being compared together in respect to magnitude, and surfaces and solids.
  • adjective (Math.) surds having different radical signs.

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

  • adjective Diverse in kind or nature; composed of diverse parts.
  • adjective mathematics Incommensurable because of different kinds.
  • adjective physics Having more than one phase (solid, liquid, gas) present in a system or process.
  • adjective chemistry Visibly consisting of different components.
  • adjective computing Of a network comprising different types of computers, potentially with vastly differing memory sizes, processing power and even basic underlying architecture; alternatively, of a data resource with multiple types of formats.

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

  • adjective consisting of elements that are not of the same kind or nature
  • adjective originating outside the body

Etymologies

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

[From Medieval Latin heterogeneus, from Greek heterogenēs : hetero-, hetero- + genos, kind, race; see genə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Medieval Latin heterogeneus, from Ancient Greek ἑτερογενής ("of different kinds"), from ἕτερος (heteros, "other, another, different") + γένος (genos, "kind"). Compare hetero- and -ous.

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Examples

  • - so think of entities as a table of tables - they use the term heterogeneous containment to describe this idea.

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2009

  • Mightn't a fair bit of the action be in heterogeneous technologies for repressing extreme preferences?

    Reduction to Banality, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • The good and the bad parts of our lives do not interlock with reassuring neatness across the course of a lifetime; instead they sit together in heterogeneous disarray, elbowing one another like distant ancestors told to bunch up tight for a family photograph.

    On Reading Zen « Tales from the Reading Room 2009

  • Make the category less heterogeneous, in other words, and it may actually start to have some scientific integrity.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • Menschen (The optical image in heterogeneous media and the dioptrics of the human crystalline lens), 1908, which was awarded the Centenary Gold Medal of the Swedish Medical Association.

    Allvar Gullstrand - Biography 1967

  • You can see the different between two substances its called heterogeneous mixture.

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows anotnysavio 2009

  • I'm not sure I heard "heterogeneous" -- one of the terms that computer companies like to use even when they don't really mean it -- uttered once during the five-hour broadcast.

    CNET News.com 2010

  • I'm not sure that I heard "heterogeneous" -- one of the terms that computer companies like to use, even when they don't really mean it -- uttered once during the five-hour broadcast.

    Medlogs - Recent stories 2010

  • I'm not sure that I heard "heterogeneous" -- one of the terms that computer companies like to use, even when they don't really mean it -- uttered once during the five-hour broadcast.

    Medlogs - Recent stories 2010

  • Anthropogenic biomes are not simple vegetation categories, and are best characterized as heterogeneous landscape mosaics combining a variety of different land uses and land covers.

    Anthropogenic biomes 2009

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