Deaf means unable to hear. Born deaf, deaf in one ear, a deaf child.
Language here matters and is contested. Many deaf people describe themselves plainly as deaf and reject hearing-impaired as clinical; capital-D Deaf is used for the cultural community that uses sign language. Hard of hearing describes partial loss. Deaf and dumb is offensive and long out of use. Note turn a deaf ear, meaning to refuse to listen, and fall on deaf ears, said of a plea nobody acts on — both idioms rather than descriptions.
1adjectivedeafUnable to hear.
“She has been deaf in one ear since childhood.”
2adjectiveunwillingUnwilling to listen.
“The committee was deaf to every objection.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
deaf is a state of not hearing.
Old English deaf comes from a Germanic root meaning dull or obscured, related to the words behind dumb and dust. The idea was of a sense clouded over rather than absent, which is closer to how partial hearing loss actually works.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰewbʰ-
Middle English
def
English, today
deaf
From Middle English def. From Middle English def, deef, from Old English dēaf, from Proto-West Germanic daub (“deaf”), from Proto-Germanic daubaz (“deaf or stunned”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰewbʰ- (“to whisk, smoke, darken, obscure”). Cognate with Ancient Greek τυφλός (“blind”). See also dumb. a doublet of daff and dof and dowf. Cognate with Dutch doof, German taub, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål døv, Norwegian Nynorsk dauv, Swedish döv, Faroese deyvur, Icelandic daufur.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA