MEANING
1. Unwanted involvement or obstruction that disrupts a process, activity, or decision.
2. The combination of overlapping waves that produces a stronger or weaker resulting wave.
3. The influence of one language on the use of another, especially when it causes errors.
Use it for
describing outside involvement that compromises independence; identifying one process disrupting another; explaining why a task performs poorly in competing conditionsDistinguishes disruption by another activity or influence from simple failure, and separates obstructive interference from physical wave combination. Academic functions: Causation / Relationships, Research / Methodology.
Words that belong together
- political interference
- interference with decision-making
- interference from competing tasks
On the page
The report recommends safeguards against political interference in data collection.
The experiment examines interference from a competing memory task.
Constructive interference increases the amplitude of the resulting wave.
The demonstration contrasts interference between waves with absorption by a material.
The analysis attributes some word-order errors to interference from the first language.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- interference
Usage notes
Usually uncountable. General patterns: interference in + affairs/decisions; interference with + activity; interference from + source. Countable an interference occurs in some specialized contexts. Register: neutral. Commonness: common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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