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Solid solution formation has long been commonly used to reduce the lattice thermal conductivity for thermoelectrics because of phonon scattering by point defects due to mass and strain fluctuations1.This scattering is expected to be maximal for vacancies2.In this paper we demonstrate the strong effect of phonon-vacancy scattering for very low lattice thermal conductivity in many thermoelectric semiconductors such as Ⅲ-Ⅴ,Ⅳ-Ⅵ,diamond-like and nonstoichiometric AgSbTe2.The resulting high zT in these materials proves the effectiveness of this strategy and its availability for high performance thermoelectrics in general.