I'm looking for a single-word antonym for the word "exceeds" when it's being used without a subject. For example:
"When the interest on a debt exceeds the holder's income, bankruptcy is inevitable."
"Surely the man was insane. Like when a mad autocrat's reach exceeds his grasp, but none of his advisors dare speak up, he had begun operating in a vacuum."
"Show only those results where the distance exceeds 5 miles"
"Avoid committing to any lease where the term exceeds 48 months."
The problem is that when it's being used to describe a quantitative thing, the word appears to be unopposed by a single-word counterpart (much like "surpasses" or "transcends" or "surmounts", it occurs to me, now I start to write this question out):
"Where the distance __________ 5 miles."
"is less than"
"falls short of"
"is shy of"
Am I just out of luck here? I ask because I'm a software engineer, I'm stuck working within a very finite amount of screen real estate, and I have asks from the client that I cannot sidestep:
I've never found myself wanting in the vocabulary department before, and I'm nearly convinced there is no such direct antonym, but I figure I'll pick the community's collective brain before going back to them and risk suffering the indignity of them off-the-cuffing a counterexample.