shortcoming

UK/ˈʃɔːtˌkʌmɪŋ/US/ˈʃoɹtˌkʌmɪŋ/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: shortcomings

A shortcoming is a fault or weakness that keeps something from being good enough. It falls short, and here is where.

It is usually plural, and listing the shortcomings of a plan is the standard formula of any critical report. The word is measured rather than harsh, which is why it appears in official writing where failing would sound too strong. Applied to a person it is gentler than fault. It is written as one word, and the image is of falling short of a mark.

Definitions of shortcoming

1nounshortcomingA fault or failure to meet a required standard.C1
“The report lists three serious shortcomings.”

Also accepted in games: flaw, failing

Where it comes from

From short + coming.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 14 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

shortcoming in the wild

A fundamental shortcoming of the Me 163, and all other aircraft based on it, was extremely limited endurance, typically only a few minutes.
Rikugun Ki-202
The clamshell design is fairly robust, but the battery door is the shortcoming of this whole line; 18C, 19B, and 28C/S models.
HP-18C
Early releases had a slightly blurry, yellower and duller screen compared with the Nokia 7210 and 6610 of the same period, but later screens improved this shortcoming.
Nokia 6100
The model HP-25C, introduced in 1976, addressed that shortcoming through the first use of battery-backed CMOS memory in a calculator, termed continuous memory by HP.
HP-25
The shortcoming of the above solutions are their inability to work outside of a single NAT environment.
Desktop sharing

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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