heterogeneous
/ˌhɛt(ə)rə(ʊ)ˈdʒiːnɪəs
/adjective
1Diverse in character or content: a large and heterogeneous collection...
- Almost two decades later, it is still hard to quantify such settlements, as the city's topography accentuates their heterogeneous character and formal diversity.
- Apparently, Canada succeeded where the U.S. had failed in assembling multiculturally diverse, heterogeneous groups of people.
- Distributed widely as they are in the political spectrum, these heterogeneous groups represent very diverse outlooks and interests as a whole.
Synonyms
diverse, diversified, varied, varying, miscellaneous, assorted, mixed, sundry, contrasting, disparate, different, differing, divergent, unrelated, variegated, wide-ranging;
motley
literary divers, myriad, legion
rare contrastive
1.1 Chemistry Of or denoting a process involving substances in different phases (solid, liquid, or gaseous): heterogeneous catalysis...
- For this reason the process chosen is usually heterogeneous catalysis, because this keeps the cost and the number of process steps to a minimum.
- Chemisorption plays an essential role in corrosion, heterogeneous catalysis, and electrochemistry.
- My research interests are organic chemistry mechanisms, organometallic chemistry, and heterogeneous catalysis.
1.2 Mathematics Incommensurable through being of different kinds, degrees, or dimensions.The heterogeneous variant should be counted twice, because statistically it is twice as likely as either of the homogeneous combinations....
- If the rate ratio was heterogeneous, then the maximum-likelihood estimates of parameters under the free-ratio model were used to calculate d N and d S along each branch.
- In this article, we implement a number of models (statistical distributions) for heterogeneous ratios among sites.
Usage
The correct spelling is heterogeneous, but a fairly common misspelling is heterogenous. The reason for the error probably relates to the pronunciation, which, in rapid speech, often misses out the extra e. Heterogenous is actually a different word, which is used in specialized medical and biological senses and means ‘originating outside the organism’.
Derivatives
heterogeneously
- Student participants were selected at random from 130 heterogeneously grouped students after signed consent was obtained.
- There were bilingual and native English speakers, those who came from English-speaking homes, heterogeneously mixed in the participating classrooms.
- Functionally equivalent genes may evolve heterogeneously across closely related taxa as a consequence of lineage-specific selective pressures.
heterogeneousness
- Another was their ability to forge illusory stylistic coherence despite their records' actual heterogeneousness.
- Here's an argument, inspired by Tocqueville, that we can assess the health of a democracy by examining the heterogeneousness of its culture.
- Present day processes of creating new economic environments seem to point more towards a large heterogeneousness of these social forms, hence of markets.
Origin
Early 17th century: from medieval Latin heterogeneus, from Greek heterogenēs, from heteros 'other' + genos 'a kind'.