dropout

[drop-out] /ˈdrɒpˌaʊt/

noun

an act or instance of dropping out.

a student who withdraws before completing a course of instruction.

a student who withdraws from high school after having reached the legal age to do so.

a person who withdraws from established society, especially to pursue an alternate lifestyle.

a person who withdraws from a competition, job, task, etc.:

the first dropout from the presidential race.

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.

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.

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

British Dictionary definitions for drop-outs

dropout

/ˈdrɒpˌaʊt/

noun

a student who fails to complete a school or college course

a person who rejects conventional society

(rugby) drop-out. a drop kick taken by the defending team to restart play, as after a touchdown

(electronics) drop-out. a momentary loss of signal in a magnetic recording medium as a result of an imperfection in its magnetic coating

verb (intransitive, adverb) often foll by of

to abandon or withdraw from (a school, social group, job, etc)

Word Origin and History for drop-outs

dropout

"one who 'drops out' of something," 1930, from drop (v.) + out (adv.). As a phrase, drop out "withdraw" is recorded from 1550s.

Slang definitions & phrases for drop-outs

dropout

noun

A person who withdraws; voluntary self-excluder, esp from school or college (1920s+)

drop-outs in Technology

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.
[Jargon File]
(2001-02-22)