1. (n.) Blame; cause of blame; fault; crime; offense.
2. (n.) Deficiency; want; need; destitution; failure; as, a lack of sufficient food.
3. (v. t.) To blame; to find fault with.
4. (v. t.) To be without or destitute of; to want; to need.
5. (v. i.) To be wanting; often, impersonally, with of, meaning, to be less than, short, not quite, etc.
6. (v. i.) To be in want.
7. (interj.) Exclamation of regret or surprise.
Thesaurus Entries
absence, adulteration, arrearage, awayness, bare cupboard, bare subsistence, be found wanting, be in want, be insufficient, be pinched, be poor, beggarliness, beggary, blank, break, collapse, come short, dearth, decline, defalcation, default, defect, defectibility, defectiveness, deficiency, deficit, deprivation, destitution, discontinuity, drought, empty purse, erroneousness, fail, fail of, fall away, fall short, fall shy, fallibility, famine, faultiness, gap, go on welfare, grinding poverty, gripe, hand-to-mouth existence, hiatus, homelessness, immaturity, impairment, imperfection, impoverishment, impurity, inaccuracy, inadequacy, inadequateness, incompleteness, indigence, inexactitude, inexactness, insufficiency, interval, kick the beam, lacuna, lag, lose ground, mediocrity, mendicancy, miss, missing link, moneylessness, necessitousness, necessity, need, neediness, neverness, nonexistence, nonoccurrence, nonpresence, not answer, not hack it, not make it, not make out, not measure up, not qualify, not stretch, not suffice, nowhereness, omission, outage, patchiness, paucity, pauperism, pauperization, penury, pinch, privation, require, run short, run short of, scantiness, scarcity, shortage, shortcoming, shortfall, sketchiness, slump, starvation, starve, stop short, subtraction, ullage, underage, undevelopment, unevenness, unperfectedness, unsoundness, want, wantage
