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Scarce vs Deficiency - What's the difference?

scarce | deficiency |

As an adjective scarce

is uncommon, rare; difficult to find; insufficient to meet a demand.

As an adverb scarce

is scarcely, only just.

As a noun deficiency is

(uncountable) inadequacy or incompleteness.

scarce

English

(wikipedia scarce)

Adjective

(er)
  • Uncommon, rare; difficult to find; insufficient to meet a demand.
  • * (John Locke)
    • You tell him silver is scarcer now in England, and therefore risen one fifth in value.
  • * , chapter=3
    • , title= Mr. Pratt's Patients , passage=My hopes wa'n't disappointed. I never saw clams thicker than they was along them inshore flats. I filled my dreener in no time, and then it come to me that 'twouldn't be a bad idee to get a lot more, take 'em with me to Wellmouth, and peddle 'em out. Clams was fairly scarce over that side of the bay and ought to fetch a fair price.}}
  • Scantily supplied (with); deficient (in); used with of .
  • * (John Milton)
    • A region scarce of prey.

    Adverb

    (-)
  • Scarcely, only just.
  • * Milton
    • With a scarce well-lighted flame.
  • * 1854 , (Edgar Allen Poe), (The Raven):
    • And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure that I heard you [...].
  • * 1898 , , (Moonfleet) Chapter 4:
    • Yet had I scarce set foot in the passage when I stopped, remembering how once already this same evening I had played the coward, and run home scared with my own fears.
  • * 1931 , William Faulkner, Sanctuary , Vintage 1993, p. 122:
    • Upon the barred and slitted wall the splotched shadow of the heaven tree shuddered and pulsed monstrously in scarce any wind.

    See also

    * make oneself scarce

    Anagrams

    *

    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

    External links

    * ("deficiency" on Wikipedia)