▪ I. missing, vbl. n.
(ˈmɪsɪŋ)
[f. miss v.1 + -ing1.]
† 1. Absence, privation, lack. Obs.
| a 1300 Cursor M. 14228 We sal find missing witerli Of vr god freind o bethani. 1393 Langl. P. Pl. C. xi. 201 God wol nat lete hym sterue In myschef for lacke of mete ne for myssynge of cloþes. c 1440 York Myst. i. 48 Of myrthe neuermore to haue myssyng. c 1530 Ld. Berners Arth. Lyt. Bryt. (1814) 499 Theyr hoost is..in great trouble for the myssynge of theyr emperoure. 1611 Speed Hist Gt. Brit. ix. iv. 48 Vpon which his suddaine flight and missing, the Empresse Maud..was suspected to be guiltie of his death. 1611 Shakes. Cymb. v. v. 275 My Lord,..Vpon my Ladies missing, came to me With his Sword drawne. 1634 Bp. Hall Contempl. N.T., Resurrection 282 Shee freely confesseth the cause of her griefe to be the missing of her Saviour. |
2. Failure to hit, obtain, attain to, or take advantage of.
| a 1547 Surrey æneid ii. (1557) D 2 Whether by fate, or missing of the way. 1603 Florio Montaigne i. liv, Without ever missing he would every time make it goe through a needles-eye. a 1628 Preston New Covt. (1629) 586 The missing of time bringeth misery. 1660 Pepys Diary 28 Mar., This day we had news of the election at Huntingdon for Bernard and Pedley at which my Lord was much troubled for his friends' missing of it. 1711 Addison Spect. No. 15 ¶ 7 The missing of an Opera the first Night. 1748 Anson's Voy. iii. i. 301 The currents were driving us to the northward..and we thereby risqued the missing of the Ladrones. 1749 Fielding Tom Jones xiii. ii, These kind of hair-breadth missings of happiness. 1858 O. W. Holmes Aut. Breakf.-t. ix, That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing. |
† b. missing-wood (
Bowls): see
quot. Obs.| 1753 Chambers Cycl. Supp. s.v. Bowling, Bowl-room, or missing-wood, is when a bowl has free passage, without striking on any other. |
† 3. Fault, error.
Obs.| a 1568 R. Ascham Scholem. ii. (Arb.) 88 Shew his faultes iently,..of such missings, ientlie admonished of, proceedeth glad and good heed taking. 1664 Pepys Diary 10 Aug., To see him..read it all over, without any missing, when..I could not..read one..letter of it. |
▪ II. ˈmissing, ppl. a. [f. miss v.1 + -ing2.] 1. Not present; not found; absent; gone.
spec. the missing, soldiers (sailors, etc.) neither present after an action nor known to have been killed or wounded; so
missing, presumed dead (in
quot.,
fig.). In wider use:
(to be) among the missing: to be absent, to absent oneself (
U.S. colloq.).
| a 1530 Heywood Play of Love (Brandl) 24 Whiche one ones founde I fynde of all the rest Not one myssyng. c 1566 Merie Tales of Skelton in Wks (1843) I. p. lxviii, Skelton was verye angrie that his cup was mysynge. 1607 Shakes. Temp. v. i. 255 There are yet missing of your Companie Some few odde Lads. 1611 Bible 1 Kings xx. 39 Keep this man: if by any meanes he be missing, then shall thy life be for his life. 1671 Milton P.R. ii. 15 Moses was in the Mount, and missing long. 1716 Swift Phyllis 26 Wks. 1751 VII. 168 Next Morn betimes the Bride was missing. 1833 H. Martineau Manch. Strike i. 8 Missing from home. a 1845 Hood Waterloo Ballad 40 Before I'm set in the Gazette As wounded, dead, and missing. 1848 Arnould Marine Insur. (1866) I. ii. ii. 524 The ship is what is called a missing ship, i.e. has been so long on the voyage that the owner has reason to suspect that she has met with some casualty. 1855 T. C. Haliburton Nat. & Hum. Nat. I. i. 10 If a person inquires if you are at home, the servant is directed to say, No, if you don't want to be seen, and choose to be among the missing. 1859 in Bartlett Dict. Amer. (ed. 2) 273 There comes old David for my militia fine. I don't want to see him, and think I will be among the missing. 1860 Tyndall Glac. i. xxvii. 212 In a moment the missing man was drawn from between its jaws [sc. of the fissure]. 1900 Daily News 26 May 4/2 War Office Statement... The term ‘missing’ means that a soldier's fate has not been definitely ascertained. 1917 ‘Contact’ Airman's Outings p. xii, Once eleven of our machines were posted as ‘missing’ in the space of two days. 1918 W. Owen Let. 8 Oct. (1967) 581 Must now write to hosts of parents of Missing, etc. 1962 Listener 11 Oct. 585/1 His [sc. Schönberg's] music seemed dead-alive on more than one occasion... Ernest Newman..reported him missing, presumed dead, just because he did not seem to have made it in time. |
2. That fails to hit.
| a 1586 Sidney Astr. & Stella xxiii, The curious wits,..With idle paines, and missing ayme, do guesse. 1603 Florio Montaigne i. xxxix, A never-missing runner at the Ring. |
3. Of a crop: That has failed. ?
Obs.| 1777 A. Hunter's Georgical Ess. 408 Finding some beds I had sown very early with onions to be a missing crop. |
4. Special collocations:
missing link, (
a) something lacking to complete a series; (
b)
Zool. a hypothetical type assumed to have existed between two related types;
esp. a hypothetical animal assumed to be a connecting link between man and the anthropoid apes; also applied trivially to an animal (or person) supposed to resemble the latter;
missing mass Sci., the amount by which an observed or measured mass falls short of an expected or inferred mass;
spec. in
Astr., the difference between the mass of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies calculated dynamically and the sum of the masses of the visible objects in the system; also, the difference between the mass there must be in the universe if it is closed and the total mass accounted for by direct observation;
missing person, a person whose whereabouts are unknown (and who is being sought); also
attrib. of an organization, etc., recording information about such persons;
missing word, a term which arose in 1892 in connexion with ‘competitions’ instituted by certain periodicals, the object being for the competitors to guess the appropriate word to fill a gap left in a given sentence.
| 1851 Lyell Elem. Geol. xvii. 220 A break in the chain implying no doubt many *missing links in the series of geological monuments which we may some day be able to supply. 1862 G. du Maurier Let. Oct. in Young G. du Maurier (1951) 178, I..said that if he would take the trouble to make a post mortem on the Irish roughs I intend to kill next Sunday in the Park, he might convince himself that the ‘missing link’ had been found. 1875 Jowett Plato (ed. 2) IV. 154 The metaphysical imagination was incapable of supplying the missing link between words and things. [1876 tr. E.H.P.A. Haeckel's Hist. Creation II. xxii. 293 Although the preceding ancestral stage is already so nearly akin to genuine Men that we scarcely require to assume an intermediate connecting stage, still we can look upon the speechless Primæval Men (Alali) as this intermediate link.] 1879 Gentl. Mag. CCXLV. 298 The early critics of the hypotheses of evolution were not slow to fix upon ‘missing links’ and their nature. 1883 T. Tyler in Time VIII. 476 The exhibition at the Westminster Aquarium of..‘The Missing Link’, or, according to another description, ‘The Human Monkey’. a 1930 D. H. Lawrence Phoenix II (1968) 569 One woman..wrote to me out of the blue: ‘You, who are a mixture of the missing-link and the chimpanzee, etc.’—and told me my name stank. 1936 A. O. Lovejoy Great Chain of Being viii. 235 By 1760 the triumphs of the missing-link hunters were being celebrated in verse. 1966 R. & D. Morris Men & Apes v. 126 Albertus [Magnus] made the first attempt to bridge the gap between man and the rest of the animal world by means of a kind of ‘missing link’ in the shape of the pygmy and the ape. |
| 1967 Astrophysical Jrnl. CXLVIII. 713 It has been known for some time that the mass in ordinary galaxies is inadequate by a factor of about 40 to close the Universe... Apparently the *missing mass necessary for a closed Universe could not be uniformly distributed hydrogen. 1968 M. S. Livingston Particle Physics v. 93 The magnitude of the excitation of such a heavier particle is given by the ‘missing mass’ calculated from the Q-equation when the mass of the normal particle is assumed. 1970 New Scientist 9 Apr. 57/1 Information about the incoming pi meson, the target proton and the recoil proton is sufficient to calculate the ‘missing mass’. 1976 G. B. Field in E. H. Avrett Frontiers Astrophysics xii. 529 The missing mass in the Coma cluster or other clusters. 1982 Nature 24 June 623/1 Such holes might today provide the ‘missing mass’ known to reside in clusters of galaxies and galactic haloes. |
| 1876 Geo. Eliot Dan. Der. III. iii. xx. 39 There were safer means than advertising: men might be set to work whose business it was to find *missing persons. 1943 R. Chandler Lady in Lake (1944) ii. 15 It will mean going to the Missing Persons Bureau. 1967 R. Rendell Wolf to Slaughter ii. 20 They didn't want to add to their Missing Persons list if they could help it. 1970 Guardian 7 Jan. 18/2 A ‘missing person’ poster for station notice boards will be issued soon. 1975 ‘E. Lathen’ By Hook or by Crook xv. 147 The..kids had been missing persons all through the war. |
| 1892 Times 14 Dec. 9/4 The decision of Sir John Bridge, to the effect that the ‘*missing word’ competitions..are contrary to the law by which lotteries are forbidden. Ibid. 17 Dec. 7/6 ‘Missing Word’ Lotteries. 1892 Spectator 17 Dec. 882/1 The fortunate guessers of the ‘missing word’. 1898 Gissing Town Traveller xxv, The missing word this week, discovered by an East-end licensed victualler, was pick-me-up. |
Hence
† ˈmissingly adv., with a sense of loss.
| 1611 Shakes. Wint. T. iv. ii. 35, I haue (missingly) noted, he is of late much retyred from Court. |