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Allin

interference

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌɪntə(ɹ)ˈfɪəɹəns//
  • United States//ˌɪntəɹˈfɪɹɪns//

The act of interfering with something, or something that interferes.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of interfering with something, or something that interferes.

    Somewhat impeded by constant political interference of one sort or another, British Railways are nevertheless pressing ahead with a mammoth modernisation programme; [...]

    "With magic in limited use and hidden, it was possible to enhance the various magic resistances of humans, and to keep certain forms of magic from being possible. If magic enters common usage, this interference becomes infeasible."

  2. 2

    The illegal obstruction of an opponent in some ball games.

    They were glued to the TV, as the referee called out a fifteen yard penalty for interference.

  3. 3

    An effect caused by the superposition of two systems of waves.

  4. 4

    A distortion on a broadcast signal due to atmospheric or other effects.

    They wanted to watch the game on TV, but there was too much interference to even make out the score on the tiny screen.

  5. 5

    In United States patent law, an inter partes proceeding to determine the priority issues of multiple patent applications; a priority contest.

  6. 6

    The interruption of the line between an attacked piece and its defender by sacrificially interposing a piece.

  7. 7

    A negative or inappropriate language transfer.

Etymology

From interfere + -ence. The sense in physics was likely introduced by English polymath Thomas Young, which he used as early as 1801 in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

verb

  1. 1

    To interfere.

    In economic terms, the two production processes can be simultaneously implemented without interferencing between themselves.

Forms

plural
interferences
past tense
interferenced
past participle
interferenced
present participle
interferencing
third person singular
interferences
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).