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Deficiency vs Defect - What's the difference?

deficiency | defect |

Defect is a related term of deficiency.

Defect is a synonym of deficiency.



As nouns the difference between deficiency and defect

is that deficiency is inadequacy or incompleteness while defect is a fault or malfunction.

As a verb defect is

to abandon or turn against; to cease or change one's loyalty, especially from a military organisation or political party.

deficiency

English

Noun

  • (uncountable) Inadequacy or incompleteness.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)
  • , chapter=17 citation , passage=The face which emerged was not reassuring. […]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.}}
  • (countable) An insufficiency, especially of something essential to health.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-31, volume=408, issue=8851, magazine=(The Economist)
  • , title= Promotion and self-promotion , passage=One of academia’s deficiencies is that, though its lecture halls and graduate schools are replete with women, its higher echelons are not. Often, this is seen as a phenomenon specific to the sciences. … In fact, the disparity applies to the whole grove. Another report from 2006, by the American Association of University Professors, found the same ratio in the faculties of arts, humanities and social science, too.}}
  • (geometry) The amount by which the number of double points on a curve is short of the maximum for curves of the same degree.
  • (geometry) The codimension of a linear system in the corresponding complete linear system.
  • Antonyms

    * excess

    defect

    English

    (wikipedia defect)

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A fault or malfunction.
  • a defect''' in the ear or eye; a '''defect''' in timber or iron; a '''defect of memory or judgment
  • * Macaulay
  • Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects .
  • * '>citation
  • The quantity or amount by which anything falls short.
  • * Davies
  • Errors have been corrected, and defects supplied.
  • (math) A part by which a figure or quantity is wanting or deficient.
  • Synonyms

    * See also

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • To abandon or turn against; to cease or change one's loyalty, especially from a military organisation or political party.
  • * 2013 May 23, , " British Leader’s Liberal Turn Sets Off a Rebellion in His Party," New York Times (retrieved 29 May 2013):
  • Capitalizing on the restive mood, Mr. Farage, the U.K. Independence Party leader, took out an advertisement in The Daily Telegraph this week inviting unhappy Tories to defect . In it Mr. Farage sniped that the Cameron government — made up disproportionately of career politicians who graduated from Eton and Oxbridge — was “run by a bunch of college kids, none of whom have ever had a proper job in their lives.”

    Derived terms

    * defection * defector