Defective
adj, adv, noun ·3 syllables ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A person or thing considered to be defective.
"It is an offence, subject to the exception mentioned in this section, for a person to procure a woman who is a defective to have unlawful sexual intercourse in any part of the world."
- 2 A word written without matres lectionis (letters indicating vowels).
"Thus, in the Pentateuch and in the earlier prophets the plenes are counted, whilst in the later prophets the defectives are enumerated."
- 1 Having one or more defects.
"It is likely that the long evolutionary trajectory of Mycoplasma went from a reductive autotroph to oxidative heterotroph to a cell-wall–defective degenerate parasite. This evolutionary trajectory assumes the simplicity to complexity route of biogenesis, a point of view that is not universally accepted."
- 2 Lacking some forms; e.g., having only one tense or being usable only in the third person.
- 3 Having a root whose final consonant is weak (ي, و, or ء). Arabic
- 4 Not capable of representing all the phonemic distinctions of a language it is used to write.
- 5 Spelled without matres lectionis, for example אמץ (ómets, “courage”) as opposed to the plene spelling אומץ where the letter vav ⟨ו⟩ indicates the vowel o.
- 1 not working properly wordnet
- 2 markedly subnormal in structure or function or intelligence or behavior wordnet
- 3 having a defect wordnet
- 1 Without matres lectionis (letters indicating vowels) written out. not-comparable
"For the sake of comparison, note the distribution of these spellings in some other Hebrew sources: in the MT the vowel o after the first consonant of the root is written defective in approximately 3,600 cases as against 850 cases of plene spelling."
Example
More examples"They replaced the defective TV with a new one."
Etymology
From Middle English defectif, defective, from Old French defectif, from Late Latin dēfectīvus.