[drop-out] 
| 1. | an act or instance of dropping out. |
| 2. | a student who withdraws before completing a course of instruction. |
| 3. | a student who withdraws from high school after having reached the legal age to do so. |
| 4. | a person who withdraws from established society, esp. to pursue an alternate lifestyle. |
| 5. | a person who withdraws from a competition, job, task, etc.: the first dropout from the presidential race. |
| 6. | Rugby. a drop kick made by a defending team from within its own 25-yd. (23-m) line as a result of a touchdown or of the ball's having touched or gone outside of a touch-in-goal line or the dead-ball line. |
| 7. | Also called highlight halftone. a halftone negative or plate in which dots have been eliminated from highlights by continued etching, burning in, opaquing, or the like. |
| 8. | Also called dropout error. the loss of portions of the information on a recorded magnetic tape due to contamination of the magnetic medium or poor contact with the tape heads. |
drop-outs
1. A variety of "power glitch" (see glitch); momentary zero voltage on the electrical mains.
2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system overload (one cause of such behaviour under Unix when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see screaming tty).
3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See glitch, fried.
[The Jargon File]
(2001-02-22)