Emily Dickinson Lexicon

FAIL'ING, n.

1. The act of failing; deficiency; imperfection; lapse; fault. Failings, in a moral sense, are minor faults, proceeding rather from weakness of intellect or from carelessness, than from bad motives. But the word is often abusively applied to vices of the grosser kind.
2. The act of failing or becoming insolvent.