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drop-outs - 3 dictionary results

drop⋅out

  [drop-out]
Use drop-outs in a Sentence
–noun
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.
Also, drop-out.

Origin:
1925–30, Americanism; n. use of v. phrase drop out
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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drop-outs

n.
1. A variety of `power glitch' (see glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.
2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior 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.
Jargon File 4.2.0
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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)

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2007 Denis Howe
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