I've always thought of it like a geological fault, where the two sides are misaligned. But this only fits in the case of misaligned memory access, and not in th

I've always thought of it like a geological fault, where the two sides are misaligned. But this only fits in the case of misaligned memory access, and not in the more general case of accessing illegal locations. There's also the tennis fault. It's a noun corresponding to the adjective "faulty."