drop·out

[drop-out]
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, especially 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-yard (23-meter) 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; noun use of verb phrase drop out

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
Cite This Source Link To dropout
00:10
Dropout is always a great word to know.
So is interrobang. Does it mean:
an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance.
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
Collins
World English Dictionary
dropout (ˈdrɒpˌaʊt) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]
 
n
1.  a student who fails to complete a school or college course
2.  a person who rejects conventional society
3.  rugby drop-out a drop kick taken by the defending team to restart play, as after a touchdown
4.  electronics drop-out a momentary loss of signal in a magnetic recording medium as a result of an imperfection in its magnetic coating
 
vb (often foll by of)
5.  to abandon or withdraw from (a school, social group, job, etc)

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source
Etymonline
Word Origin & History

dropout
"one who 'drops out' of something," from drop + out.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
Cite This Source
Example sentences
Pushing a gifted potential-dropout to realize her full potential is, of course, a benefit to that student.
Event, status, and cohort dropout rates each provide a different perspective on
  the student dropout population.
However, the effect of this might get wiped out by an equally high dropout rate.
The state's high school students had among the lowest achievement-test scores
  and among the highest dropout rates in the country.
Copyright © 2013 Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.
  • Please Login or Sign Up to use the Recent Searches feature
FAVORITES
RECENT