beat

UK/biːt/US/biːt/

verbB14 meanings One of the most common words in English · #327 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: beating, beats

To beat something is to hit it again and again. Rain beats on the window, a drummer beats the drum, and in the kitchen you beat two eggs in a bowl until the yolk and the white are one yellow.

It is also the plain English for winning: we beat them three-nil, and you can't beat a cup of tea on a cold morning, which is praise rather than sport. Your heart beats, wings beat, and a beat is the pulse in music that you tap your foot to. A police officer's beat is the round of streets they walk — an officer on the beat. Watch the past tense, because it catches everyone: beat, beat, beaten. Yesterday we beat them; we have beaten them twice this year.

Definitions of beat

1verbhitTo hit something repeatedly.B1~9%
“The rain beat against the window all night.”
synonyms: hit, strike, pound
2verbdefeatTo defeat someone in a game, a contest, or an election.B1~39%
“They beat us two-nil in the last five minutes.”
3nounregularA regular repeated sound or movement — of music, or of a heart.B1~50%
“The song has a slow beat you can dance to.”
4verbbeatTo stir a mixture hard and fast until it is smooth.B1~2%
“Beat the eggs and the sugar until the mixture turns pale.”
- Said"Beat the eggs for me while I grease the tin."
- WrittenHe beat the mixture by hand for ten minutes and his shoulder ached for a day.
- UsedBeat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
- ContrastBeat, not stir. Stirring keeps things moving; beating puts air in and works your arm. stir →
- Not thisYou do not beat a soup. Beating is for thick mixtures that need lift: cream, batter, cake.
- SimplyBeat the egg. It goes yellow and soft.
Patternbeat + noun (eggs, cream, butter) · beat until smooth / stiff · beat sth in / into · a beaten egg

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 76 of them on a sense (64 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Remember it

BEAT → hard and fast, like a stick on the ground

A boy beats a stick on the ground, hard and fast; you beat the eggs the same way, until they are smooth.

Phrases it lives in

beat about the bush — avoid coming to the point
off the beaten track — away from the places everybody goes
beat someone to it — get there or do it first
you can't beat it — nothing is better than this

Where it comes from

Old English bēatan carried a whole shelf of hard verbs in one word — to beat, pound, strike, lash, dash, thrust, hurt, injure — and behind it sits a Germanic word, bautaną, that meant simply to push or to strike. Everything quiet the word does now came out of that one blow repeated: the drum, the whisk in the bowl, the pulse at your wrist.

Middle English
beten
English, today
beat

From Middle English beten. 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”). 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen, Music & Instruments, Dance

Practise this word

beat in the wild

Usually, the last chord in a hemiola is a (bi-)dominant, and as such a strong harmony on a weak beat, hence a syncope.
Syncopation
The term "beat" originally was used by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to describe his social circle of friends and fellow writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, William S.
Beatnik
Kerouac said that "beat" had multiple meanings, such as "beaten down", "beatific", "beat up", and "beat out".
Beatnik
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the mensural level (or beat level).
Beat (music)
In popular use, beat can refer to a variety of related concepts, including pulse, tempo, meter, specific rhythms, and groove.
Beat (music)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

Definitions of beat

1verbhitTo hit something repeatedly.B1~9%

“The rain beat against the window all night.”

synonyms: hit, strike, pound

2verbdefeatTo defeat someone in a game, a contest, or an election.B1~39%

“They beat us two-nil in the last five minutes.”

3nounregularA regular repeated sound or movement — of music, or of a heart.B1~50%

“The song has a slow beat you can dance to.”

4verbbeatTo stir a mixture hard and fast until it is smooth.B1~2%

“Beat the eggs and the sugar until the mixture turns pale.”

Said"Beat the eggs for me while I grease the tin."
WrittenHe beat the mixture by hand for ten minutes and his shoulder ached for a day.
UsedBeat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
ContrastBeat, not stir. Stirring keeps things moving; beating puts air in and works your arm. stir →
Not thisYou do not beat a soup. Beating is for thick mixtures that need lift: cream, batter, cake.
SimplyBeat the egg. It goes yellow and soft.

Patternbeat + noun (eggs, cream, butter) · beat until smooth / stiff · beat sth in / into · a beaten egg

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 76 of them on a sense (64 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.