ALL meanings of defect
de·fect
D d - countable noun defect A defect is a fault or imperfection in a person or thing. 3
- verb defect If you defect, you leave your country, political party, or other group, and join an opposing country, party, or group. 3
- noun defect a lack of something necessary for completeness or perfection; shortcoming; deficiency 3
- noun defect an imperfection, failing, or blemish 3
- noun defect a local deviation from regularity in the crystal lattice of a solid 3
- verb defect to desert one's country, cause, allegiance, etc, esp in order to join the opposing forces 3
- noun defect lack of something necessary for completeness; deficiency; shortcoming 3
- noun defect an imperfection or weakness; fault; flaw; blemish 3
- intransitive verb defect to forsake a party or cause, esp. so as to join the opposition 3
- intransitive verb defect to leave one's country because of disapproval of its political policies and settle in another that opposes such policies 3
- abbreviation Technical meaning of DEFECT bug 3
- noun defect A shortcoming, imperfection, or lack. 1
- noun defect imperfection 1
- intransitive verb defect to country 1
- noun defect a shortcoming, fault, or imperfection: a defect in an argument; a defect in a machine. 1
- noun defect lack or want, especially of something essential to perfection or completeness; deficiency: a defect in hearing. 1
- noun defect Also called crystal defect, lattice defect. Crystallography. a discontinuity in the lattice of a crystal caused by missing or extra atoms or ions, or by dislocations. 1
- verb without object defect to desert a cause, country, etc., especially in order to adopt another (often followed by from or to): He defected from the U.S.S.R to the West. 1
- noun Technical meaning of defect (programming) An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, especially one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. E.g. "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backward." The identification and removal of bugs in a program is called "debugging". Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the "Annals of the History of Computing", Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found". This wording establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense - and Hopper herself reports that the term "bug" was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII. Indeed, the use of "bug" to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity", Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term "bug" is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus." The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a joke first current among *telegraph* operators more than a century ago! Actually, use of "bug" in the general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of "bug" is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to "bugbear", a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: "There is a bug in this ant farm!" "What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it." "That's the bug." 1
- noun defect A fault or malfunction. 0
- noun defect The quantity or amount by which anything falls short. 0
- noun defect (mathematics) A part by which a figure or quantity is wanting or deficient. 0
- verb defect (Intransitive Verb) To abandon or turn against; to cease or change one's loyalty, especially from a military organisation or political party. 0
- verb defect (military) To desert one's army, to flee from combat. 0
- verb defect (military) To join the enemy army. 0
- verb defect (law) To flee one's country and seek asylum. 0