dropout

or 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 high·light half·tone [hahy, -lahyt , haf, -tohn]. Printing, Photography. 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.

dropout

/ ˈdrɒpˌaʊt /

noun

1. a student who fails to complete a school or college course
2. a person who rejects conventional society
3. drop-out rugby a drop kick taken by the defending team to restart play, as after a touchdown
4. drop-out electronics a momentary loss of signal in a magnetic recording medium as a result of an imperfection in its magnetic coating

verb

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of dropout¹

1925–30, Americanism; noun use of verb phrase drop out

Example Sentences

The past year could result in a higher-than-usual dropout rate when districts open up full-time, in-person schooling.

From Washington Post

The self-taught college dropout used open-source information – such as data from social media, Google Maps, Google Earth – and help from a fellow community of fact-finding enthusiasts.

From Time

In his sixth novel, Lee records the adventures of this college dropout in a wild tale that moves coolly between satire and thriller.

From Washington Post

Other variants that are not of concern also have that missing gene, and so it is not possible, without a full genomic sequence, to know if a dropout is actually a signal of the British variant.

From Washington Post

The shift to remote learning is resulting in “enormous dropouts and substantial learning losses” that will reduce the earning potential of a generation of students, the World Bank said in a recent report on South Asia.

From Washington Post

He calls Kline the champion of for-profit colleges, which have a dropout rate “worse than celebrity rehab.”

From The Daily Beast

He plays Wallace, a twentysomething medical school dropout who falls for Chantry (Zoe Kazan), a capricious animator/artist.

From The Daily Beast

The engineering school dropout had sold corned beef to Africa and brokered some Brazilian diamonds with mixed success.

From The Daily Beast

Steve Jobs is possibly the most famous college dropout and touted as our modern Thomas Edison.

From The Daily Beast

On Wednesday's Late Show With David Letterman, Tom Brokaw dismissed Snowden as "a high school dropout who is a military washout."

From The Daily Beast

The economy absorbed the majority of the dropout population.

From Project Gutenberg