drop out

v 1: give up in the face of defeat of lacking hope; admit defeat;

"In the second round, the challenger gave up" [syn: {give

up}, {throw in}, {throw in the towel}, {quit}, {leave},

{chuck up the sponge}] [ant: {enter}]

2: leave school or some other program prematurely; "Many

students drop out because they are not prepared for our

challenging program"

drop-outs

1. A variety of "power glitch" (see {glitch}); momentary 0

voltage on the electrical mains.

2. Missing characters in typed input due to software

malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behaviour

under {Unix} when a bad connection to a modem swamps the

processor with spurious character interrupts; see {screaming

tty}).

3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those

occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple

of beats. See {glitch}, {fried}.

[{Jargon File}]