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Defective vs Null - What's the difference?

defective | null |

As an adjective defective

is .

As a noun null is

zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.

defective

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Having one or more defects.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-03
  • , author= , title=The Smallest Cell , volume=101, issue=2, page=83 , magazine= citation , passage=It is likely that the long evolutionary trajectory of Mycoplasma went from a reductive autotroph to oxidative heterotroph to a cell-wall–defective degenerate parasite. This evolutionary trajectory assumes the simplicity to complexity route of biogenesis, a point of view that is not universally accepted.}}
  • lacking some forms; e.g., having only one tense or being usable only in the third person.
  • Usage notes

    * Nouns to which "defective" is often applied: merchandise, goods, part, component, product, equipment, gene, unit, construction, design, drug, memory, wiring, machine, device, instrument, hardware, software, vehicle.

    Synonyms

    * faulty

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A person considered to be defective.
  • * {{quote-news, year=2007, date=January 15, author=Bernard E. Harcourt, title=The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars, work=New York Times citation
  • , passage=There were many more kinds of mental institutions at mid-century, ones for “mental defectives and epileptics” and the mentally retarded, psychiatric wards in veterans hospitals, as well as “psychopathic” and private mental hospitals. }}

    See also

    *

    null

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
  • Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
  • (Francis Bacon)
  • Something that has no force or meaning.
  • (computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
  • (computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
  • Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
  • One of the beads in nulled work.
  • (statistics) null hypothesis
  • Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Having no validity, "null and void"
  • insignificant
  • * 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
  • In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.
  • absent or non-existent
  • (mathematics) of the null set
  • (mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
  • (genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
  • Derived terms

    * nullity

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • to nullify; to annul
  • (Milton)

    See also

    * nil ----