dropout

• drop-out

Deverbal from drop out.

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: drop‧out

dropout (countable and uncountable, plural dropouts)

1. Someone who has left an educational institution without completing the course

   The politicians of the world are mere political university dropouts.

2. Someone who has opted out of conventional society.
3. One who suddenly leaves anything, or the act of doing so.
   • 1980 August 30, David Rothenberg, “A New York State of Confusion”, in Gay Community News, volume 8, number 6, page 5:

     The pastures are filled with gay political drop-outs, persons of reasonable intent who found the scene personally destructive.

   • 2010, R. Barker Bausell, Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change, page 193:

     To avoid excessive dropouts from the study, we wouldn't employ a single tutored group and a single control group that received no instruction at all.

4. (cycling) The slot in the frame that accepts the axles of the wheels.
5. A damaged portion of a tape or disk, causing a brief omission of audio, video, or data.
6. Momentary loss of an electronic signal.
7. A technique for regularizing a neural network by discarding a random subset of its units.

• dropout factory

• outdrop