to top out
1
8.0
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
abandonar la carrera
- DW well may blast 400 HRS-plus, get to 2700 hits-plus, drive in over 1500, and top out with a career BA over .305.
- top out of career
Examples
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At some point, smartphones will "top out," like PCs... will you continue to shell out money for a new phone every 2 years?
Blog text (16) -
Many employees feel they will top out at their current job after reaching a senior position without further advancement.
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Eventually, a manager like this reaches the limit of his or her experience and intuition, and his or her organization tops out.
Blog text (30) -
If $harpton had been born white, his career would have topped out as men's room.
Blog text (11) -
So the code size has a nature-imposed maximum: at some point, the capabilities of the dev org just top out maintaining this max code base.
Blog text (30) -
She decided to top out her career in marketing to pursue her passion for art instead.
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After years of hard work, he realized he would top out soon, so he started looking for new opportunities.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components suggest a partial compositional meaning: 'top' points to the highest level and the particle 'out' can signal reaching a limit or completion, so a learner might infer something like 'reach the top'. However, the specific nuance of leaving or abandoning a career just as one achieves success is not directly derivable from the parts and requires prior exposure, making the expression only partially predictable.
Etymology
Top out can be seen as the image of a climber who reaches the mountain top and then stops climbing. So top out is used to mean 'to leave or stop a career when you are at your highest success'.