What does discontinuous mean?
"Discontinuous" is an adjective describing anything marked by breaks, gaps, or interruptions rather than by an unbroken flow. A discontinuous coastline is jagged and interrupted; a discontinuous record — geological, historical, or statistical — contains missing stretches where evidence simply does not exist. The word carries a precise, technical force in mathematics, where a function is said to be discontinuous at any point where small changes in input can produce sudden jumps in output, and in genetics, where "discontinuous variation" refers to traits falling into distinct categories such as blood type. It also appears in linguistics for constituents split by intervening words. Formal and analytical in register, "discontinuous" is most at home in scholarly prose, offering writers a compact way to signal that continuity — whether of time, space, or structure — has been broken.
Not continuous; having breaks, gaps, or interruptions.
"The region's discontinuous permafrost thaws unevenly across the landscape."
(Mathematics) Not continuous at one or more points, so that arbitrarily small changes in input may cause abrupt jumps in output.
"A step function is discontinuous at each jump."
The same word that describes a patchy fossil record also names the exact point where a graph's line snaps in two — and mathematicians have spent centuries cataloguing precisely how it breaks.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of discontinuous
"Discontinuous" derives from the Latin verb "continuare," meaning to join together or make continuous, built on "continuus" (uninterrupted), itself from "continere," to hold together. English formed the word by attaching the negating prefix "dis-" to "continuous," producing an early modern term for what lacks unbroken connection. It shares this root with "continue," "continuity," "continual," and "continent."
How discontinuous is actually used
Formal to technical in register. Common in academic writing across geology, statistics, mathematics, and linguistics; less frequent in everyday speech, where words like "intermittent" or "on and off" are preferred.
Easily confused with discontinuous
"Discontinued" means something has been permanently stopped or withdrawn (as a product line), while "discontinuous" describes something inherently broken into parts rather than flowing without interruption.