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Disability vs Deficiency - What's the difference?

disability | deficiency |

As nouns the difference between disability and deficiency

is that disability is state of being disabled; deprivation or want of ability; absence of competent physical, intellectual, or moral power, means, fitness, and the like while deficiency is inadequacy or incompleteness.

disability

Noun

(en-noun)
  • State of being disabled; deprivation or want of ability; absence of competent physical, intellectual, or moral power, means, fitness, and the like.
  • * (rfdate),
  • Grossest faults, or disabilities to perform what was covenanted.
  • * (rfdate),
  • Chatham refused to see him, pleading his disability .
  • Want of legal qualification to do a thing; legal incapacity or incompetency.
  • * (rfdate), .
  • The disabilities of idiocy, infancy, and coverture.
  • (uncountable, informal) Regular payments received by a disabled person, usually from the state
  • I had to go on disability after the accident.
    Did you get your disability this month?

    Usage notes

    * Disability and inability: Inability is an inherent want of power to perform the thing in question; disability arises from some deprivation or loss of the needed competency. One who becomes deranged is under a disability of holding his estate; and one who is made a judge, of deciding in his own case. A man may decline an office on account of his inability to discharge its duties; he may refuse to accept a trust or employment on account of some disability prevents him from entering into such engagements.

    Synonyms

    * disqualification * impotence * inability * incapacity * incompetency * incompetence * weakness

    Antonyms

    * ability * capacity * competence * competency * potence * potential * qualification * strength

    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