Meaning
Someone who leaves school, college or university without finishing the course; more broadly, anyone who abandons a programme, group or conventional society. The counterculture sense - a person who has opted out of the system - follows Timothy Leary's slogan 'turn on, tune in, drop out'. British usage often hyphenates (drop-out). US education statistics distinguish dropouts from stopouts, students who pause study and return. Leary always insisted the slogan urged conscious detachment rather than idleness. Regional use: United States origin; now general English.
Origin
The noun is a twentieth-century growth with a fuzzy start, and the dictionaries disagree about which sense counts as the debut. The OED traces dropout itself to 1867, in Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle - a sporting use for a horse or competitor dropping out of a race - while Etymonline dates the leavers' sense, 'one who drops out of something', to 1930 (a dating read by the research agent; Etymonline resisted re-fetching this session). The education sense is early twentieth-century American, and the social sense exploded in the 1960s. Leary first used 'turn on, tune in, drop out' at the opening of a press conference in New York City on 19 September 1966, and repeated it at San Francisco's Human Be-In in January 1967, before a gathering Wikipedia numbers at 30,000. He later credited Marshall McLuhan with the phrasing, suggested over a New York lunch, and insisted in his autobiography Flashbacks (1983) that dropping out meant an active, selective, graceful detachment rather than quitting constructive activity.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dropouts
- stopout
Usage Examples
- The startup's founder was a college dropout who still read more than anyone else in the room.
- By second term he was a dropout, working nights and telling anyone who asked that university was not the only door.
- After 1967 the festival circuit had turned dropout into a philosophy as much as a status.