Other forms: defects, defected, defecting
A defect is a fault that was built in — there from the moment the thing was made. A wobble in a new chair leg, a dead pixel in the corner of a screen, a whole batch of cars called back because one wire was fitted the wrong way round.
Defect is more official than 'problem': factories track defect rates, and a manufacturing defect is what the warranty covers. Medicine uses it as well — a birth defect is something wrong from birth. There is a second word spelt the same: to defect is to leave your country or your party for the other side, said of spies, footballers and politicians. The stress moves with the meaning — DE-fect for the fault, de-FECT for the leaving. The adjective is defective, meaning it does not work; do not reach for 'deficient', which means short of something.
1noundefectA fault in something, present from the time it was made.~50%
“The phone had a defect in the screen and went back the next day.”
2verbleaveTo leave your country, party or side and join another.~50%
“Two players defected to the rival club in January.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Defect comes straight from Latin defectus, 'a failure, a lack', the past participle of deficere, 'to fail, to lack'. Break deficere open and you find de- ('from') and facere ('to do') — literally undone. Which is what a defect is: the place where the making did not finish properly.
Latin
dēfectus
English, today
defect
Built from
Borrowed from Latin dēfectus. Latin defectus (“a failure, lack”), from deficere (“to fail, lack, literally 'undo'”), from past participle defectus, from de- (“of, from”) + facere (“to do”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA