Dropout

How to spell dropout

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dropout

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dropout mean?

1. nounA person who leaves a school, course, or activity before finishing it.
2. nounA brief loss of an electronic signal, connection, or recorded data.

Dropout in a sentence

• The company hired a college dropout who had built a successful app.

• The call suffered a dropout every time the train entered a tunnel.

• As a high school dropout, she went back years later to earn her diploma.

• Engineers traced the audio dropout to a faulty cable.

Where does dropout come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a homegrown English compound built from two very old native words. The first element, 'drop', goes back to the Old English noun 'dropa', meaning a small falling globule of liquid; the verb sense of letting something fall, and then of falling or moving away, grew naturally out of that. The second element, 'out', is the equally ancient Old English 'ut', signalling movement away from or beyond something. The phrasal verb 'to drop out', meaning to withdraw or fall away from a group or activity, was in use long before the solid noun appeared. The noun 'dropout', written as one word, is a twentieth-century coinage that became especially common in mid-1900s American education and youth culture to name someone who leaves school or rejects mainstream society. The spelling trap is simply remembering that the noun closes up into one word while the verb phrase 'drop out' stays as two.

How the word is built

• drop (Old English dropa: a falling globule, hence 'to fall away')
• out (adverb of separation), forming a closed compound noun