1912 Science 12 Apr. 592 The upper thermal death point is therefore so near the usual range and the malfunctioning due to any rise is so great, that each species adopts some safeguard against overheating.

1921 Jrnl. Philos. 18 617 They were entirely unaware of such a circumstance as the sole critical cause of their elaborate mal-functioning.

1948 S. N. Alexander in Proc. Symp. Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery 1947 (U.S. Navy Dept. & Harvard Univ.) 250 The first step is to ascertain whether the ‘lock out’ is the result of malfunctioning of the checking system.

1958 Times 14 Mar. 10/1 Through ‘mechanical malfunctioning’, a B-47 bomber aircraft dropped what is described as ‘an unarmed nuclear device’.

1988 P. Gay Freud iv. 184 He had been sorely disappointed by the failure of contemporary medical orthodoxy to explain the workings, and the malfunctioning, of the mind.

1966 T. Pynchon Crying of Lot 49 i. 14 A dented, malfunctioning version of himself.

1981 Economist 4 Apr. 96 The shuttle will be able to retrieve a malfunctioning satellite and either service it in space or bring it back down to earth for maintenance.

1993 Independent on Sunday 7 Nov. (Review Suppl.) 78/3 My fellow patients were, I found, bizarrely normal, semi-animate proof of the classlessness and agelessness of malfunctioning minds.