short of

Idioms  

1. Having an inadequate supply of, as in We're short of cash right now . [Late 1600s] Also see fall short of .

2. Less than, inferior to, as in Nothing short of her best effort was needed to make the team . [Mid-1500s]

3. Other than, without resorting to, as in Short of yelling, I had no other way of getting his attention .

4. See stop short , def. 3.

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Example Sentences

Now, judging by Marina Zenovich’s unvarnished profile, a viewer would prefer to be almost anywhere else, short of an emergency room.

From The Wall Street Journal

Few celebrities of his stature, short of Joan Crawford or Meghan Markle, have been the subjects of such a widely disseminated trashing, and in Mr. Chase’s case it all seems . . . well, not unjustified.

From The Wall Street Journal

Still, at around $220, the shares are well short of where they sat two years ago at about $260.

From Barron's

But while current job numbers remain far short of its operational heyday, Site Director Stuart Law expects the number of people working there to remain relatively stable for years to come, adding 99.9% of all of radiation had gone from the site.

From BBC

“We’re significantly short of our customers’ needs and it’s going to persist for a while,” said Sumit Sadana, chief business officer of Micron Technology, one of the largest makers of the high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI.

From The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

• deficient
• faulty
• inadequate
• incomplete
• meager
• poor
• scant
• scarce
• unsatisfactory