blemish

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Damaging and spoiling
adulterant
adulterate
adulterated
adulteration
applecart
butcher
drive a wedge between someoneidiom
dry rot
eat
eat away at something
erode
foul
queer
rain on someone's paradeidiom
rampage
ravage
ravages
seismic
sour
wreck

flaw | American Dictionary

flaw
noun[ C ]
us/flɔ/
a fault or weakness, esp. one that happens while something is being planned or made and that makes it not perfect:
A flaw in the steering mechanism led to a recall of 200,000 cars.

flaw | Business English

flaw
noun[ C ]
uk /flɔː/us
a fault, mistake, or weakness, especially one that happens while something is being planned or made:
The company had to spend millions correcting design flaws.
serious/major/minor flaw (in sth)There seemed to be no serious flaws in the proposal and it was recommended for further consideration.

Examples of flaw

flaw
The tendency to see constitutions as predetermined legal moulds can be a source of flawed institutional arrangements and eventual institutional failure.
If this assumption does not hold, the inferences we make will be flawed.
Even so, he claims that, as a categorizing principle, class was ' less flawed ' than any other.
However, these are minor flaws, and do not detract much from the overall excellence of the book.
None has suggested that it is theoretically flawed.
Finally, are case-control studies so flawed that they should not be used to investigate outbreaks of waterborne cryptosporidiosis ?
However, we have shown that the functional argument is flawed since it is uninformative.
While appealing in one sense, this solution suffers from two flaws.
As an historical study of the relationship between liberalism and empire, however, it is flawed, mainly due to the scope of its claims.
Here, there is every sign that the adaption is flawed in its design, and the script is not up to the task in hand.
Ultrasonic inspecting subsystem: it is carried by the robot to detect the flaws and to measure the thickness of the tank surface.
Moral progress is possible, but advance will always be piecemeal and constrained by the moral pilgrim's prior (unavoidably flawed) quality of discernment.
Cross-sectional studies are often flawed due to the proliferation of confounding variables.
Is current phonology flawed by a lack of formal precision - and if so, what parts ?
Despite its flaws, which one hopes will be corrected in a subsequent edition, this book is a valuable one.
See all examples of flaw
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withflaw

flaw

These are words often used in combination with flaw.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

basic flaw
Rather, its basicflaw is related to the value of autonomy.
character flaw
The belief that depression was a characterflaw was greater at baseline the longer the physician worked in the clinic (r= x0.24, p<0.03).
design flaw
Instruction thus seems to have led many learners to overlook this designflaw in the pragmatics of the test items.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
See all collocations with flaw