[syn: insufficiency, inadequacy, deficiency]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
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]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
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, deficiency, want]
2: lack of an adequate quantity or number; "the inadequacy of
unemployment benefits" [syn: insufficiency, inadequacy,
deficiency] [ant: adequacy, sufficiency]
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:
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