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dropout

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,905 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: dropouts

A dropout is a student who left school before finishing. A high school dropout, dropout rate, university dropouts.

It is a blunt word for a statistic that measures the system as much as the person — dropout rates track poverty closely. It is also used of people who reject conventional life, which was the 1960s sense. Note drop out, written as two words for the verb; and that a dropout in signal means a brief loss.

Definitions of dropout

  1. 1noundropoutA student who left school before finishing.B2+

    “He was a college dropout who went on to start a successful company.”

dropout is a person who left.

Where it comes from

Deverbal from drop out.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in School & Learning

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dropout in the wild

  • A dropout is a type of fork end that allows the rear wheel to be removed without first derailing the chain.

    Fork end

  • Some single-speed bicycles intended for street or trail use are also equipped with track fork ends instead of dropouts.

    Fork end

  • An exhaustive meta-analysis of 146 studies in Western countries showed that the mean dropout rate is 34.8% with a wide range of 10.3% to 81.0%.

    Psychotherapy discontinuation

  • The studies from the US had a dropout rate of 37.9%.

    Psychotherapy discontinuation

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.