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Precarious vs Null - What's the difference?

precarious | null |

As an adjective precarious

is (comparable) dangerously insecure or unstable; perilous or precarious can be (dentistry) relating to incipient caries.

As a noun null is

zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.

precarious

English

Etymology 1

From (etyl) , and Spanish and Italian precario.

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • (comparable) Dangerously insecure or unstable; perilous.
  • *
  • , title=(The Celebrity), chapter=4 , passage=One morning I had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join him in a variety of amusements. But even here I was not free from interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with a fox terrier.}}
  • (legal) Depending on the intention of another.
  • Synonyms

    * (not held or fixed securely and likely to fall over) unsteady, rickety, shaky, tottering, unsafe, unstable, wobbly

    Usage notes

    * Because the (term) element of (term) derives from prex and not the preposition prae, this term cannot — etymologically speaking — be written as *.

    Quotations

    * 1906 , (Jack London), , part I, ch III, *: Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious .

    Derived terms

    * precariously * precariousness * precariat * precarisation, precarization * precarity

    Etymology 2

    pre-'' + ''carious

    Adjective

    (-)
  • (dentistry) Relating to incipient caries.
  • 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 ----