missing

Not able to be located; gone, misplaced.

Adjective

  1. Not able to be located; gone, misplaced.
    • my missing socks
    • Forty three killed and 80 wounded in action with the Implacable. 180 killed and miſſing in action with the Centaur. - 1808 October 1, “State of Public Affairs in September. Containing Official Papers and Authentic...
    • She was so mad she wouldn't speak to me for quite a spell, but at last I coaxed her into going up to Miss Emmeline's room and fetching down a tintype of the missing Deacon man. - 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter...

    Synonyms: absent lost

  2. Not present when it (they) should be.
    • missing data point
    • Joe went missing last year. He had all teeth missing when he was finally found.
    • We've got some flatware missing - There seem to be some cooking utensils missing too!
  3. Of an internal combustion engine: running roughly due to an occasional lack of a spark or other irregular fault.

Origin

By surface analysis, miss + -ing.

Derived

go missing missing boundary missing in action missing in time missingly missing man formation missing market missing middle missingness missing piece missing stair missing time missing trader fraud missing white girl syndrome missing white woman syndrome nonmissing turn up missing

Noun

  1. A value that is missing.
    • The treatment of missings is a problem in statistical software. - 1997, S. Klinke, Data Structures for Computational Statistics, page 27:
    • Patterns of missings across the whole data set are readily visible, but also patterns which only apply to small subgroups of cases. - 2002, David J. Hand, Niall M. Adams, Richard J. Bolton, Pattern Detection and...

Forms

missings

Related

missing in action missing link missing person

Verb

  1. present participle and gerund of miss