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Definition of defective in English:

defective

(also mental defective)

Pronunciation /dəˈfektiv/ /dəˈfɛktɪv/

See synonyms for defective

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adjective

  • 1Imperfect or faulty.

    ‘complaints over defective goods’
    • ‘The legislation, according to its critics, would have provided legal loopholes for those responsible for defective products, faulty construction and even criminal acts.’
    • ‘Some buses examined by inspectors in the last year have been found to have defective steering, faulty brakes or even bald tyres.’
    • ‘The list of faults included defective tyres, faulty brakes and defective steering.’
    • ‘Hundreds of injuries, and some deaths, were linked to such devices as defective heart valves, faulty pacemakers, and substandard intrauterine devices.’
    • ‘Our service and post-sales support is designed to replace faulty or defective products, and to provide training for the proper operation and configuration of network hardware.’
    • ‘Summonses totalling R416000 have been served on drivers whose vehicles were found to have defects which included smooth tyres, defective brakes and faulty lights.’
    • ‘Plato regarded the world of pure mathematical ideas as alone worthy of study; if physical objects did not conform to it, so much the worse for them, because they were defective and imperfect anyway.’
    • ‘Relaxation is one of the treatments for defective vision.’
    • ‘We are talking about corporations which - thanks in part to their own defective strategic vision, in part to circumstances beyond their control - appear to have lost the plot.’
    • ‘I think I spent most of my childhood under the impression that I just wasn't trying hard enough, or that perhaps my vision was somehow defective.’
    • ‘The patient said that as a young man he had used the Bates method for improving defective vision.’
    • ‘Careless driving includes using a mobile phone while driving, driving without care or attention or with broken or defective lights.’
    • ‘My idea was to get a bunch of cheap wallets and fill my bag with junk, like defective cameras and broken portable CD players.’
    • ‘During a three-hour check of 59 Hackney carriages and private hire vehicles they found eight had defective tyres, while one had a faulty exhaust.’
    • ‘These problems are associated with defective binocular vision and a comparable difficulty in locating sounds, due to abnormally-arranged nerve pathways from the eyes and inner ears to the brain.’
    • ‘Apple packing houses currently rely on digital camera imagery to sort apples by surface appearance only, flagging those that are visibly defective or the wrong size or color.’
    • ‘He didn't smoke, and he jogged and worked out and ate right, but he had a defective heart - the wrong number of valves or something.’
    • ‘Weak or defective spaces in the organs or tissues are where a pathological condition is likely to begin.’
    • ‘There is some validity in their argument, because if our understanding is inherently imperfect, regulations are bound to be defective.’
    • ‘The study found 35,000 of the district's 50,000 street lights need to be replaced because they are defective or too old - more than 5,000 of them are over 40 years old.’
    faulty, flawed, imperfect, shoddy, inoperative, not working, not functioning, non-functioning, malfunctioning, out of order, unsound
    View synonyms
    1. 1.1Lacking or deficient.
      ‘dystrophin is commonly defective in muscle tissue’
      • ‘A genetic selection for mutants that activate this pathway uncovered a class of mutants defective in cell wall integrity.’
      • ‘Mutants that grew on these plates were judged to be defective in glucose metabolism and were not studied further.’
      • ‘A case study of cause-and-effect, it's also a yarn of dangerously defective brotherly love.’
      • ‘Responses to GIP have been shown to be defective in type 2 diabetic patients.’
      lacking, wanting, deficient, inadequate, insufficient, short, low, scant
      View synonyms
    2. 1.2Grammar (of a word) not having all the inflections normal for the part of speech.

  • 2

    (also mentally defective)
    dated, offensive Having mental disabilities.

noun

dated, offensive

  • A person with mental disabilities.