FLAW • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Flaw

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/flɔ/ Listen

noun

Flaw n.

1.

A crack or breach; a gap or fissure; a defect of continuity or cohesion; as, a flaw in a knife or a vase. "This heart Shall break into a hundered thousand flaws."

2.

A defect; a fault; as, a flaw in reputation; a flaw in a will, in a deed, or in a statute. "Has not this also its flaws and its dark side?"

3.

A sudden burst of noise and disorder; a tumult; uproar; a quarrel. (Obs.) "And deluges of armies from the town Came pouring in; I heard the mighty flaw."

4.

A sudden burst or gust of wind of short duration. "Snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw." "Like flaws in summer laying lusty corn."

Synonyms: Blemish; fault; imperfection; spot; speck.

verb

Flaw v. t. (past & past part. flawed; pres. part. flawing)

1.

To crack; to make flaws in. "The brazen caldrons with the frosts are flawed."

2.

To break; to violate; to make of no effect. (Obs.) "France hath flawed the league."

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Etymology of 'Flaw'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Flaw" Quotes from Famous Books

... since it would tend to keep up the idea that he is an actual London entity. We are very confident that he is not a London non-entity, but are willing to agree that he is either the one or the other. The flaw that we are after lies in his interstitial logic, not in the hallucination in which he indulges respecting nonentities. His assumption that life cannot exist without an organism, of which it is the phenomenal manifestation, is what we propose ...

— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... author by profession for a party. As a Tory writer he dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded it by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MSS. to the printer, who was never discovered; and was once saved by a flaw in the indictment, from the simple change of an r for a t, or nor for not, one of those shameful evasions by which the law, to its perpetual disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punishment. Dr. Drake had the honor of hearing himself censured from the throne, of being imprisoned, ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various

... because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble's skin contracted or expanded and the Nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could ...

— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin

... well understand, friend Reasono," observed Noah, "why the 'arth should heel under so sudden a flaw, though a well-ballasted ship would right again when the puff was over; but I cannot understand how a little steam leaking out at one end of a craft should set her agoing at the rate we are ...

— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... still hoped to find it in Manicheeism, but he began to think that it was a long time coming. The leaders of the sect could not have trusted him thoroughly. They feared his acute and subtle mind, so quick to detect the flaw in a thesis or argument. That is why they postponed his initiation into their secret doctrines. Augustin remained a simple auditor in their Church. By way of appeasing the enormous activity of his intelligence, they turned him on to controversy, and the critical ...

— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

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