Word.ws English Dictionary

tune in, turn on, drop out

tune in, turn on, drop out phrase: to pay attention to the new way of living; to go within yourself, to take drugs; to abandon the established ways and cease conforming.

Phrase

tune in, turn on, drop out

  1. To pay attention to the new way of living; to go within yourself, to take drugs; to abandon the established ways and cease conforming.
    • That research might eventually move the category of drugs from their turn-on-tune-in-drop-out heyday in counterculture San Francisco to the mainstream.2018 August 23, Kara Swisher, “How and Why Silicon Valley Gets High”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Forms of tune in, turn on, drop out

alternative formturn on, tune in, drop out

Origin of tune in, turn on, drop out

A counterculture slogan that first appeared in the 1960s and popularized by Timothy Leary and attributed to Marshall McLuhan.

Questions about tune in, turn on, drop out

What does tune in, turn on, drop out mean?
Tune in, turn on, drop out means to pay attention to the new way of living; to go within yourself, to take drugs; to abandon the established ways and cease conforming.
What part of speech is tune in, turn on, drop out?
Tune in, turn on, drop out is a phrase.

Words near tune in, turn on, drop out in the dictionary

  1. tunduns
  2. Tundup
  3. tune
  4. tune down
  5. tune in
  6. tune in, turn on, drop out
  7. tune out
  8. tune the old cow died of
  9. tune up
  10. tune-up
  11. tune-ups

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tune in, turn on, drop out (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tune_in%2C_turn_on%2C_drop_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.