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 excess of liabilities over assets (usually over a certain period); "last year there was a serious budgetary deficit"
(sports) the score by which a team or individual is losing
a deficiency or failure in neurological or mental functioning; "the people concerned have a deficit in verbal memory"; "they have serious linguistic deficits"
the quality of being difficult; "they agreed about the difficulty of the climb"
a factor causing trouble in achieving a positive result or tending to produce a negative result; "serious difficulties were encountered in obtaining a pure reagent"
a condition or state of affairs almost beyond one's ability to deal with and requiring great effort to bear or overcome; "grappling with financial difficulties"
the complex of emotional and intellectual attributes that determine a person's characteristic actions and reactions; "it is his nature to help others"
the essential qualities or characteristics by which something is recognized; "it is the nature of fire to burn"; "the true nature of jealousy"
a particular type of thing; "problems of this type are very difficult to solve"; "he's interested in trains and things of that nature"; "matters of a personal nature"
the natural physical world including plants and animals and landscapes etc.; "they tried to preserve nature as they found it"
a causal agent creating and controlling things in the universe; "the laws of nature"; "nature has seen to it that men are stronger than women"
the arithmetic operation of summing; calculating the sum of two or more numbers; "the summation of four and three gives seven"; "four plus three equals seven"
a concluding summary (as in presenting a case before a law court)
(physiology) the process whereby multiple stimuli can produce a response (in a muscle or nerve or other part) that one stimulus alone does not produce
(usually plural) a part of a fruit or vegetable that is pared or cut off; especially the skin or peel; "she could peel an apple with a single long paring"
a thin fragment or slice (especially of wood) that has been shaved from something