Word.ws English Dictionary

for lack of

for lack of preposition: synonym of for want of.

Preposition

for lack of

  1. Synonym of for want of.
    • Chasca's ring is unique. It appears to be, for lack of a better term, a massive piece of alien "installation art." The rings are made of small pieces of synthetic material, and are almost invisible from space. From the ground, they catch and scatter the light of Matano in picturesque ways. It is...2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Chasca planetary description
    • December 2019 Letters: Boulder’s demographic stagnation; Republicans are funny; an invisible minority Boulder Daily Camera
      Yet there is an invisible minority of those with these disorders who, unlike those poster children we think of, pass, for lack of a better word, undetected in our daily lives....
    Synonyms:
    for want of

Examples of for lack of in a sentence

  • It appears to be, for lack of a better term, a massive piece of alien "installation art." The rings are made of small pieces of synthetic material, and are almost invisible from space.2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Chasca planetary description:
  • Premonstratensian double communities of monks and nuns ended up being separated, and most of the nunneries withered away for lack of resources or endowments to support even the most ascetic of lives.2024, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than the Angels, Penguin, published 2025, page 277:

Synonyms of for lack of

Questions about for lack of

What does for lack of mean?
For lack of means synonym of for want of.
How do you use for lack of in a sentence?
It appears to be, for lack of a better term, a massive piece of alien "installation art." The rings are made of small pieces of synthetic material, and are almost invisible from space.
What part of speech is for lack of?
For lack of is a preposition.

Words near for lack of in the dictionary

  1. for instances
  2. for Ireland
  3. for it
  4. for keeps
  5. for kicks
  6. for lack of
  7. for lack of trying
  8. for land's sake
  9. for land's sake alive
  10. for land's sakes
  11. for land's sakes alive

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: for lack of (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “for lack of.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/for_lack_of. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.