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say it: SHAWR-tuhj
shortage is a noun meaning "the property of being an amount by which something is less than expected or required". It is pronounced /ˈʃɔɹtədʒ/ — SHAWR-tuhj. It carries 2 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”
an acute insufficiency
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 shortage 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.