shortage

1. 1.

   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”

   Synonymsdeficitshortfall

   Broaderinsufficiency

   Narroweroxygen deficit
2. 2.

   an acute insufficiency

   Synonymsdearthfamine

   Broaderlack

Other forms of shortage

plural

shortages·

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.

Questions about shortage

What does shortage mean?

shortage means "the property of being an amount by which something is less than expected or required". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in shortage?

shortage has 2 syllables: shor-tage. The stress falls on "shor". In IPA it is /ˈʃɔɹtədʒ/.

What is another word for shortage?

Close synonyms include deficit, shortfall, dearth, famine. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is shortage a common word?

shortage is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.