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say it: DEF-uh-suht
deficit is a noun meaning "the property of being an amount by which something is less than expected or required". It is pronounced /ˈdɛfəsət/ — DEF-uh-suht. It carries 4 recorded senses.
the property of being an amount by which something is less than expected or required
“new blood vessels bud out from the already dilated vascular bed to make up the nutritional deficit”
a deficiency or failure in neurological or mental functioning
“the people concerned have a deficit in verbal memory”
“they have serious linguistic deficits”
an excess of liabilities over assets (usually over a certain period)
“last year there was a serious budgetary deficit”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for deficit come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.