Deficiency

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Deficiency \De*fi"cien*cy\, n.; pl. {Deficiencies}. [See
     {Deficient}.]
     The state of being deficient; inadequacy; want; failure;
     imperfection; shortcoming; defect. "A deficiency of blood."
     --Arbuthnot.
     [1913 Webster]


  
           [Marlborough] was so miserably ignorant, that his
           deficiencies made him the ridicule of his
           contemporaries.                          --Buckle.
     [1913 Webster]
  
     {Deficiency of a curve} (Geom.), the amount by which the
        number of double points on a curve is short of the maximum
        for curves of the same degree.
        [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  deficiency
       n 1: the state of needing something that is absent or
            unavailable; "there is a serious lack of insight into
            the problem"; "water is the critical deficiency in
            desert regions"; "for want of a nail the shoe was lost"
            [syn: {lack}, {want}]
       2: lack of an adequate quantity or number; "the inadequacy of
          unemployment benefits" [syn: {insufficiency}, {inadequacy}]
          [ant: {sufficiency}, {sufficiency}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  109 Moby Thesaurus words for "deficiency":
     absence, adulteration, arrearage, arrestment, baseness, beggary,
     blemish, break, bug, callowness, catch, crack, dearth, defalcation,
     default, defect, defectibility, defection, defectiveness, deficit,
     demerit, deprivation, dereliction, destitution, discontinuity,
     drawback, drought, erroneousness, failing, failure, fallibility,
     famine, fault, faultiness, faute, fewness, flaw, foible, frailty,
     gap, hiatus, hole, immaturity, impairment, imperfection,
     impoverishment, impurity, inaccuracy, inadequacy, inadequateness,
     incompetence, incompleteness, incompletion, inexactitude,
     inexactness, infirmity, insufficiency, interval, kink, lack,
     lacuna, little problem, littleness, maladroitness, meanness,
     mediocrity, miscarriage, missing link, need, neglect, omission,
     outage, patchiness, pettiness, privation, problem, rift,
     scantiness, scrappiness, shabbiness, short measure, short weight,
     shortage, shortcoming, shortfall, sin, sketchiness, smallness,
     snag, something missing, starvation, subnormality, taint,
     triviality, ullage, underage, underdevelopment, undevelopment,
     unevenness, unperfectedness, unskillfulness, unsoundness,
     vulgarity, vulnerable place, want, wantage, weak link, weak point,
     weakness