Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Lacking an essential quality or element: deficient in common sense.
- adj. Inadequate in amount or degree; insufficient: a deficient education.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Lacking; wanting; incomplete.
- Defective; imperfect; inadequate: as, deficient strength.
- Not having a full or adequate supply: as, the country is deficient in the means of carrying on war.
Wiktionary
- adj. Lacking something essential; often construed with in.
- adj. Insufficient or inadequate in amount.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Wanting, to make up completeness; wanting, as regards a requirement; not sufficient; inadequate; defective; imperfect; incomplete; lacking.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. of a quantity not able to fulfill a need or requirement
- adj. falling short of some prescribed norm
- adj. inadequate in amount or degree
Etymologies
- From Latin deficiens, present participle of deficere ("to lack, fail, be wanting"); see defect. (Wiktionary)
- Latin dēficiēns, dēficient-, present participle of dēficere, to fail, be wanting; see defect. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Exactly how much vitamin D children and adults should get, and defining when they are deficient, is under debate.”
“Because the thought that smokers are somehow mentally weak and that their lives are deficient is wrong.”
“Unsupervised children wandering around with soulless eyes and vitamin deficient skin.”
“Finally, with only 4-11 foot through lanes the tunnel is capacity deficient from the git-go.”
“Anyone Who Says There Aren’t Going to Be Cost Overruns Is Fooling Themselves.” « PubliCola
“Produced and directed by Hank Bedford, this short followed the extremely energetic (and possibly Ritalin deficient) road warrior gearing up for another summer of peddling educational books.”
“Furthermore, effective demand could not remain deficient for long without the central bank's taking the falling inflation rate as a signal to cut expected short-term real interest rates and thus to move by policy means the economy back toward the natural rate of unemployment.”
“Another area where I think automakers are unnecessarily deficient is A/C power.”
“A lady at Paris, Madame Caumartin, has a copy in which there is not a word deficient; but she obstinately refused to lend it that the others may be made complete.”
“Madame Caumartin, has a copy in which there is not a word deficient; but she obstinately refused to lend it that the others may be made complete.”
“An informed person might note that as the ranking members, and later, chairmen, of their respective banking committees, both gentlemen had a significant hand in forming the regulations they said were "deficient" - after the event.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘deficient’.
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Mirrored Vowels
Rules:
• The word must have an even number of vowels.
• There must be four or more vowels; thus, at minimum, an A-A-A-A or A-B-B-A pattern.
• The vowels must appear in a mir...feminine, solicitor, caruncular, repackager, semiprimes, fetishises, decomposer, demonlover, recomposer, sepultures, lipotropic, colesterol and 385 more...
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words which are common but i am not f...
acquest, acquaint, acknowledge, urge, dodge, mitigation, basis, pledge, fulfill, fraction, infraction, deprive and 15 more...
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Kangaroo Words 2
Kangaroo words with joey-antonyms, e.g., pest/pet
pest, friend, giant, cremate, covert, there, feast, wonderful, animosity, inattentive, electrocuted, rectitude and 54 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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lunamum's list
boh!
glocalism, millenarianism, deficient, rigorous, word, way, discourse, controversial, opponent, warrant, assertion, prescription and 1 more...
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the first list
an immense, grandiloquent list that loads like a thousand years sentence in stone. new words are in the other lists.
ridiculous, brummagem, predicament, sanctimonious, vapid, eschew, admonish, auspicious, capitulation, enumerate, lachrymose, tenet and 1648 more...
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Personal Vocabulary List
All my favourite words that I come across!
veritable, incongruence, rigamorole, letcherous, revolting, repulsive, reputrid, rapatious, forays, guise, placate, paradigm and 1162 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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Miss Sunshine
she's such a joy.
bereaved, bitter, cheerless, dejected, depressed, despairing, despondent, disconsolate, dismal, distressed, doleful, downcast and 405 more...
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kingofbash's Words
bash, poleaxed, salacious, libertine, charlatan, aplomb, fortuitous, finagle, apoplectic, debutante, carte blanche, aardvark and 472 more...
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classic695's Words
delighted, elated, energetic, excited, enthusiastic, elevated, happy, contented, fine, pleased, satisfied, compassionate and 168 more...
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Mary and Max (2009)
Words from 2009 'Mary and Max' film.
muddy, puddle, birthmark, piggyback, pensive, gumnut, pompom, salvage, takeaway, oven, shed, deliberate and 112 more...
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worddom
put words in their place
theca, wisdom, kingdom, freedom, boredom, seldom, martyrdom, abdomen, doom, samhita, duma, dumka and 151 more...
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my dictionary
able, abnormally, abroad, absent, abstract, acceptable, acceptance, access, accessible, accession, according to, account and 4551 more...
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Learned words
Words which are highly likely to be found in the work of learned writers.
ailurophile, labyrinthine, lagniappe, colleague, anechoic, reglets, fluctuations, scalar, implicit, constitute, mortification, ambassadors and 629 more...
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Opethead's list
All Words
deplore, immense, ominouse, dilapidated, dunghill, admonitary, procuring, legilimens, mediocre, implicitly, beseechingly, imperiously and 170 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for deficient.
oroboros deFicIenT May 16, 2008