continuity

Lack of interruption or disconnection; the quality of being continuous in space or time.

Adjective

  1. Being the successor to a no longer extant organization, operating under the same name and usually claiming to be the same entity.
    • The irony that was one of the other republican splinter groups in the field, the Continuity IRA, also claimed by virtue of its name that it was the authentic IRA. - 1999, Peter Taylor, Behind the Mask: The IRA and Sinn...
    • This new group looked like another of those which eked out a herbivorous existence in the scrubland just this side of the Monster Raving lunatic fringe, something akin to the continuity Liberal Party perhaps, or the...
    • Stalls lined the corridors: the continuity SDP was there, as was the Free Speech Union, along with countless anti-trans organisations. - 2025, Morgan Jones, “At the Battle of Ideas”, in London Review of Books:

    Synonyms: continuing

Origin

Borrowed from Middle French continuité, from Latin continuitas. By surface analysis, continu(e) + -ity.

Noun

  1. Lack of interruption or disconnection; the quality of being continuous in space or time.
    • While troubleshooting the heating and cooling system, we found a lack of continuity in a circuit that is normally closed.
    • Considerable continuity of attention is needed to read German philosophy.
    • Vacuum-fitted wagons are provided with complete vacuum-brake equipment; "piped" wagons have through pipes, enabling them to be marshalled in vacuum-braked trains without interrupting the continuity of the vacuum brake...
  2. A characteristic property of a continuous function.
    • The definition of a continuous function assumes that the function is already defined for x = a. If this is not the case, however, it is sometimes possible to assign such a value to the function for x = a that the...
  3. A narrative device in episodic fiction where previous and/or future events in a series of stories are accounted for in present stories.
    • In “Treehouse Of Horror” episodes, the rules aren’t just different—they don’t even exist. If writers want Homer to kill Flanders or for a segment to end with a marriage between a woman and a giant ape, they can do so...
  4. A canon; one specific fictional universe within a multiverse.
    • At a live filmed announcement at Midtown Comics in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso and executive editor Tom Brevoort announced a new status quo for the Marvel Universe, with worlds...
  5. Consistency between multiple shots depicting the same scene but possibly filmed on different occasions.
  6. The announcements and messages inserted by the broadcaster between programmes.

Forms

continuities

Synonyms

continence continuity continuousness flow ongoingness uninterruptedness

Antonyms

discontinuity noncontinuity unevenness

Hyponyms

endlessness intactness

Related

continue continual continuousness

Derived

bicontinuity business continuity planning continuity announcer continuity nod continuity series discontinuity equicontinuity hemicontinuity Lipschitz continuity noncontinuity retcon Scott continuity semicontinuity sequential continuity solution of continuity uniform continuity