out of the loop

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Meaning · English

Not informed or involved in a situation or decision

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

Không được thông tin hoặc tham gia vào tình huống hoặc quyết định

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: outside a circular flow of information
Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

I ' ve been out of the loop for a while.
For five years Bush insisted he was ‘ out of the loop’ on the arms for hostages deal.

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “out of the loop” mean?

Not informed or involved in a situation or decision Literally: outside a circular flow of information

Is “out of the loop” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.