drop-off
a vertical or very steep descent: The trail has a drop-off of several hundred feet.
a decline; decrease: Sales have shown a considerable drop-off this year.
a place where a person or thing can be left, received, accommodated, etc.: a new drop-off for outpatients.
applied when a rented vehicle is left elsewhere than at the point of hire: to pay a drop-off charge.
Origin of drop-off
1Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
How to use drop-off in a sentence
The effort has not just been focused on “drop-off” voters—that is, Democrats who voted in 2012 but not in the 2010 midterms.
Not far from the drop-off point, the team ran into their first roadblock.
The drop-off is even steeper over the past 30 years: in 1982 the number was 56.4 percent.
How We Read Now: 10 Facts from the National Endowment for the Arts Report | Thomas Flynn | September 26, 2013 | THE DAILY BEASTThe U.S. economic recovery, largely driven by a recovery in housing, could be threatened by this drop-off.
Rising interest rates spur drop in mortgage financing activity | Edward Ferguson | July 12, 2013 | THE DAILY BEASTBut I would expect to see some drop-off in applications, perhaps a substantial one.
A fine, large fire was started on the ledge of rock that extended out from the "Shelter" to a drop-off of some twenty feet.
The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills | Janet AldridgeI crossed a mesa and came to an abrupt drop-off—two hundred feet sheer.
The Hive | Will Levington ComfortHere we met another problem, in the form of a rounded ten foot drop-off to the concrete table.
The Image and the Likeness | John Scott Campbell
British Dictionary definitions for drop off
(intr) to grow smaller or less; decline
(tr) to allow to alight; set down
(intr) informal to fall asleep
a steep or vertical descent
a sharp decrease
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Other Idioms and Phrases with drop-off
Fall asleep, as in When I looked at Grandma, she had dropped off. [Early 1800s]
The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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