Going away from the place you are thinking of, rather than coming toward it. It is the word on signs, timetables and screens: outbound trains, the outbound lane of a highway, an outbound flight, outbound traffic leaving the city on a Friday night. Its opposite is 'inbound'. Note that the centre point is wherever the speaker or the system sits — so 'outbound from Taipei' means leaving Taipei, even if the passenger feels they are going home. In travel booking, 'the outbound' can stand alone as a noun for the first half of a return trip: 'the outbound is on Monday, the return on Friday.' Business and technology borrow it heavily: an outbound call is one your company makes to a customer (as against an inbound call, which the customer makes to you), outbound sales means going out to find buyers, and in computing, outbound data or an outbound connection is traffic leaving your machine or network. It is a flat, technical, official-sounding word — nobody says 'I'm outbound' about walking to the shop.