beat
/biːt/ noun, verb, adjective
Forms beats beating beated beaten beatest beateth
- noun A stroke; a blow.
- noun A pulsation or throb. “a beat of the heart”
- noun (music) A pulse on the beat level, the metric level at which pulses are heard as the basic unit. Thus a beat is the basic time unit of a piece.
- noun A rhythm. “I love watching her dance to a pretty drum beat with a bouncy rhythm!”
- noun (music) The rhythm signalled by a conductor or other musician to the members of a group of musicians.
- noun The instrumental portion of a piece of hip-hop music.
- noun The interference between two tones of almost equal frequency.
- noun (authorship) A short pause in a play, screenplay, or teleplay, for dramatic or comedic effect.
- verb (transitive) To hit; to strike. “As soon as she heard that her father had died, she went into a rage and beat the wall with her fists until her knuckles bled.”
- verb (transitive) To strike or pound repeatedly, usually in some sort of rhythm. “He danced hypnotically while she beat the atabaque.”
- verb (intransitive) To strike repeatedly; to inflict repeated blows; to knock vigorously or loudly.
- verb (intransitive) To move with pulsation or throbbing.
- verb (transitive) To win against; to defeat or overcome; to do or be better than (someone); to excel in a particular, competitive event. “Jan had little trouble beating John in tennis. He lost five games in a row.”
- verb (intransitive, nautical) To sail to windward using a series of alternate tacks across the wind.
- verb (transitive) To strike (water, foliage etc.) in order to drive out game; to travel through (a forest etc.) for hunting.
- verb To mix food in a rapid fashion. Compare whip. “Beat the eggs and whip the cream.”
- verb simple past tense of beat
- adjective (US slang) Exhausted. “After the long day, she was feeling completely beat.”
- adjective (slang) Dilapidated, beat up. “Dude, you drive a beat car like that and you ain’t gonna get no honeys.”
- adjective (African-American Vernacular and gay slang) Having impressively attractive makeup. “Her face was beat for the gods!”
Synonyms
newsbeat knock pound strike hammer whack abuse aggress assail assault attack beleaguer bepommel beset besiege bombard charge come down on dust up fall on round pulse pulsation heartbeat rhythm musical rhythm beatnik meter metre measure
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English beten, from Old English bēatan (“to beat, pound, strike, lash, dash, thrust, hurt, injure”), from Proto-West Germanic *bautan, from Proto-Germanic *bautaną (“to push, strike”).
Cognate with Dutch boten, botten, butten (“to push, strike”), German boßen (“to thrash”), Gothic *𐌱𐌰𐌿𐍄𐌰𐌽 (*bautan, “to beat, strike”) (whence, probably, Galician and Portuguese botar (“to expel; to throw”)); also Latin fūstis (“club, cudgel, knobbed stick, staff”), *fūtō (“to strike”), Albanian bahe, hobe (“sling”), Armenian բութ (butʻ), բույթ (buytʻ, “thumb”).
From Middle English bet (simple past of beten "to beat"), from Old English bēot (simple past of bēatan "to beat"). Middle English bet would regularly yield *beet; the modern form is influenced by the present stem and the past participle beaten, perhaps by analogy with the Early Modern English paradigm eat:eat (“ate”):eaten. Pronunciations with /ɛ/ (from Middle English bette, alternative simple past of beten) are possibly analogous to read (/ɹɛd/), led, met, etc.
From beatnik, or beat generation.
Webster’s 1913
- verb To strike repeatedly; to lay repeated blows upon; as, to beat one's breast; to beat iron so as to shape it; to beat grain, in order to force out the seeds; to beat eggs and sugar; to beat a drum.
- verb To punish by blows; to thrash.
- verb To strike repeatedly; to inflict repeated blaows; to knock vigorously or loudly.
- verb To move with pulsation or throbbing.
Etymology [OE. beaten, beten, AS. beátan; akin to Icel. bauta, OHG. b. Cf. 1st Butt, Button.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “beat”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details