Tense as all human beings are (9)
I believe the answer is:
imperfect
'tense' is the definition.
(the imperfect tense is a grammatical tense)
'all human beings are' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
'human' could be 'imp' (imp is a kind of human) and 'imp' is found within the answer.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
'as' acts as a link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for imperfect that I've seen before include "Having faults" , "Flawed, defective" , "Faulty; tense" , "Describing continuous actions" , "Deficient" .)