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The dictionary says:

fall short

fail to meet an expectation or standard.

Say a company set a sale target of 1 million dollar in revenue per year.

There are 2 situations:

Situation 1: the company just has 0.1 million dollar in revenue this year.

Situation 2: the company has 0.95 million dollar in revenue this year.

Can I say "the company fell short of its sales target" in both situations?

In both situations, the company failed to meet its expectation. The only difference is the latter almost got it and the former is far from getting it.

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    I'm confused; the title talks about trying, but the body of the question doesn't. (Bottom line, how hard you try or how hard you fail don't matter.) Commented Jul 17 at 21:58
  • Look at the definition you posted - "to fall short" says nothing about how short something fell or anything about how much someone tried to achieve something. Commented Jul 18 at 10:08

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"Falling short" means failure to meet expectation. It doesn't imply how close to the expectation the results were.

You could say "the company fell short of its sales target" in both situations you identified.

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If you shoot an arrow at a distant target and it has almost reached the target, it has fallen short. If you shoot an arrow at a distant target and it travels only half the distance to the target you wouldn't say merely that it has "fallen short" but that it has "fallen well short" of the target. If you shoot yourself in the foot, it would be self-deprecating humor to say that it "fell short".

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  • IMO "fall short" is often used ironically, but it depends on the situation. Saying "someone's behaviour has fallen short of expectations" can mean they narrowly failed, but is also used as an understated way of saying they behaved abominably. But in a business context, such irony is less common. Commented Jul 18 at 10:53
  • @StuartF - when companies or organisations are shown to have 'behaved abominably' they very often issue statements saying something like 'We regret that our service on this occasion fell short of our usually high standards' Commented Jul 18 at 11:07
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To "fall short" means to fail to meet some objective. You tried to life 200 pounds but were only able to life 100 pounds, etc.

The phrase can be used regardless of the reason for not meeting the objective. You could fall short because, even though you tried very hard, you just weren't capable enough. You could fall short because outside forces intervened. You could fall short because you didn't give sufficient effort. Probably other reasons.

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