deficiency

Noun

deficiency (countable and uncountable, plural deficiencies)

1. (uncountable) Inadequacy or incompleteness.
   • 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.1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 17, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC

   Synonyms:

   lack, lacking, lackingness, want

   Antonyms:

   sufficiency, plenty, plentitude, plenitude, excess, surfeit

2. (countable) An insufficiency, especially of something essential to health.
   • 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...2013 August 31, “Promotion and self-promotion”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8851

   Synonyms:

   lack, lacking, want, shortage

   Antonyms:

   sufficiency, excess, surfeit

3. The amount by which the number of double points on a curve is short of the maximum for curves of the same degree.
4. The codimension of a linear system in the corresponding complete linear system.