faulted

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of fault.

   Critics faulted the author for relying on tired clichés.

   The committee had faulted the company's handling of the crisis.

   Note

   One spelling serves as both past tense and participle, and it carries two very different verbs. In "critics faulted the author" it means blamed. In "the ground is badly faulted" it means fractured: Railway Magazine in 1955 describes rock near Whitehaven with a downthrow of 480 feet. Context tells them apart, because people and their work get faulted while rock simply is faulted. Computing has its own page-fault adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Of a memory page, having experienced a page fault after being accessed while not currently held in physical memory.

   Like reaching for a tool that's been put away in storage: work pauses while someone fetches it back.

   The operating system tracks how many faulted pages occur per second to gauge memory pressure.

   When a faulted page is retrieved from storage, the instruction that triggered it resumes execution.

   Note

   A systems administrator's adjective that sits before its noun, as in the faulted page. It is not comparable, since a page either triggered the fault or did not. Æleen Frisch's Essential System Administration (2002) shows what usually follows: when the faulted page is read in, nearby pages are loaded in the same I/O operation to head off further faults. The geologist's faulted ground is a different word, the participle of the verb.

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