Callout
noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 An outgoing telephone call.
- 2 An instance of being summoned to visit a certain place in order to provide assistance; an instance of summoning someone who is on call.
"I had to pay for the callout of the plumber after the pipe burst."
- 3 A meeting or rally held in order to find interested participants, e.g. for an activity or sports team. US
"So many people attended the basketball callout that the coach decided to form two teams."
- 4 An invitation to fight. slang
- 5 A request for people to join or take part.
"[…] a callout for volunteers to fill hundreds of sandbags."
Show 5 more definitions
- 6 A pull quote: an excerpt from an article (such as in a news magazine) that is duplicated in a large font alongside the article so as to grab a reader's attention and indicate the article's topic.
"Ancient Egypt: Civilization in northeastern Africa that gives reference volumes a chance to change up the pace a little and break up the monotonous, text-heavy format with more graphical elements, timelines, and a few callout boxes."
- 7 An annotation that pertains to a specific location in a body of text or a graphic, and that is visually linked to that location by a mark or a matching pair of marks.
- 8 The act of calling out from work, i.e. announcing that one cannot attend; the act of calling in sick.
"On this particular day, I felt ill, mostly from exhaustion, and had to call out from work. This callout caused a stir and a display of animosity."
- 9 A form of verbal abuse with the intention of making the victim feel guilty. idiomatic
- 10 The invocation of an external third-party component.
"2011, Wes Nolte, Jeff Douglas, Salesforce Handbook (page 300)"
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"I had to pay for the callout of the plumber after the pipe burst."
Etymology
Deverbal from call out.
Related phrases
More for "callout"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.