Of, relating to, or resulting in the manufacture of products without flaws, defects, or errors; (also of a product) without flaws, defects, or errors.
1964
The new concept in vendor source development of Martin-Denver's aggressive ‘Zero-Defect’ quality assurance program.
Bristol (Pennsylvania) Daily Courier 19 August 19
1989
Workers focusing on the zero-defect concept were to promote a constant conscious desire to do their jobs right the first time.
R. E. Cole, Strategies for Learning (1991) ix. 159
1995
A revolutionary feature of the new systems is the zero-defect software.
Financial Times 24 February 11/2 (advertisement)
2015
In order to ensure zero-defect quality, 100% inspection must be carried out.
J. K. Bandyopadhyay, Basics Supply Chain Management xii. 250
Frequency
zero-defect typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zero-defect is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zero-defect, adj., 1960–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1960
0.0048
1970
0.0063
1980
0.0072
1990
0.0072
2000
0.0086
2010
0.01
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.