What is disorder, to condensed matter physicists?

Condensed matter physicists throw around the term "disorder" quite a bit - what does this mean, and how is it quantified?  This is particularly important when worrying about comparatively delicate, exotic quantum states, as in the recent discussions of the challenge of experimentally observing emergent Majorana fermions at the interfaces between semiconductor nanowires and superconductors.  

Latent in the use of the word "disorder" is a contrast with "order".  One of the most powerful ideas in condensed matter is Bloch's theorem:  In (infinite) crystalline solids, the spatial periodicity of the arrangement of atoms in a lattice leads to the conservation of a quantity \(\hbar \mathbf{k}\), the crystal momentum, for the electrons.  The allowed energies of single-electron states in that lattice (neglecting electron-electron interaction effects) is then a function \(E(\mathbf{k})\), and it is possible to think about a wavepacket (blob) of electrons with some dominant \(\hbar \mathbf{k}\) propagating along, as discussed extensively here for example.   "Disorder" in this context is some break with perfect spatial periodicity, which breaks \(\mathbf{k}\) conservation - in the Drude picture, this is what causes electron trajectories to scatter and do a random, diffusive walk.  

Now, not all disorder is created equal.  In a metal like gold, there is a quantitative difference between having a dilute concentration of silver atoms substituted on gold sites, and alternately having the same concentration of vacancies on gold sites.  Surely the latter is somehow more disordered.  In quantum classes, we learn to think about scattering lengths, and in conductors one can ask the physically motivated question, how far would a wavepacket propagate between scattering events (a "mean free path", \(\ell\), compared to its dominant wavelength \(\lambda\)?  For a metal we can think of the product  \(k_{\mathrm{F}} \ell\), where \(k_{\mathrm{F}}\) is the Fermi wavevector, \(2 \pi/ \lambda_{\mathrm{F}}\).  A "good metal" has \( k_{\mathrm{F}} \ell >> 1 \).  When \(k_{\mathrm{F}} \ell\  < 1\), it doesn't make sense to think of propagating wavepackets anymore.  

In other contexts, it's more helpful to think of disorder explicitly as associated with an energy scale that I'll call \(\delta\).  Some sort of structural change in a material away from ordered perfection leads, on some length scale, to a shift in electronic energies by an amount of typical magnitude \(\delta\).  The question then becomes, how does \(\delta\) compare with other energy scales in the material?  The case above where \(k_{\mathrm{F}} \ell < 1\) roughly corresponds to \(\delta\) being comparable to the electronic bandwidth (the energetic extent of \(E(\mathbf{k})\).  When one wants to think about the effects of disorder on superconductors, an important ratio is \(\delta/\Delta\), where \(\Delta\) is the superconducting gap energy scale of the ordered case.   When one wants to think about the effects of disorder on some fragile emergent phase like a fractional quantum Hall state, then a relevant comparison is between \(\delta\) and the relevant energy scale associated with that state.  

TL/DR version:  "Disorder" is a catch-all term, and it is quantified by how strongly the system is perturbed away from some target ordered condition.  

It's worth remembering that some of the progenitors of modern physics thought that it would be impossible to learn much about the underlying physics of real materials because disorder would be too severe and too idiosyncratic (that is, that each kind of defect would have its own peculiar impacts).  That's why Pauli derisively said "Festkörperphysik ist eine Schmutzphysik" (solid-state physics is the physics of dirt).   Fortunately, we have been able to learn quite a bit, and disorder has its own beautiful results, even if it continues to be the bane of some problems.