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Beat   /bit/   Listen
verb
Beat  v. t.  (past beat; past part. beaten; pres. part. beating)  
1.
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. "Thou shalt beat some of it (spices) very small." "They did beat the gold into thin plates."
2.
To punish by blows; to thrash.
3.
To scour or range over in hunting, accompanied with the noise made by striking bushes, etc., for the purpose of rousing game. "To beat the woods, and rouse the bounding prey."
4.
To dash against, or strike, as with water or wind. "A frozen continent... beat with perpetual storms."
5.
To tread, as a path. "Pass awful gulfs, and beat my painful way."
6.
To overcome in a battle, contest, strife, race, game, etc.; to vanquish, defeat, or conquer; to surpass or be superior to. "He beat them in a bloody battle." "For loveliness, it would be hard to beat that."
7.
To cheat; to chouse; to swindle; to defraud; often with out. (Colloq.)
8.
To exercise severely; to perplex; to trouble. "Why should any one... beat his head about the Latin grammar who does not intend to be a critic?"
9.
(Mil.) To give the signal for, by beat of drum; to sound by beat of drum; as, to beat an alarm, a charge, a parley, a retreat; to beat the general, the reveille, the tattoo. See Alarm, Charge, Parley, etc.
10.
To baffle or stump; to defy the comprehension of (a person); as, it beats me why he would do that.
11.
To evade, avoid, or escape (blame, taxes, punishment); as, to beat the rap (be acquitted); to beat the sales tax by buying out of state.
To beat down, to haggle with (any one) to secure a lower price; to force down. (Colloq.)
To beat into, to teach or instill, by repetition.
To beat off, to repel or drive back.
To beat out, to extend by hammering.
To beat out of a thing, to cause to relinquish it, or give it up. "Nor can anything beat their posterity out of it to this day."
To beat the dust. (Man.)
(a)
To take in too little ground with the fore legs, as a horse.
(b)
To perform curvets too precipitately or too low.
To beat the hoof, to walk; to go on foot.
To beat the wing, to flutter; to move with fluttering agitation.
To beat time, to measure or regulate time in music by the motion of the hand or foot.
To beat up, to attack suddenly; to alarm or disturb; as, to beat up an enemy's quarters.
Synonyms: To strike; pound; bang; buffet; maul; drub; thump; baste; thwack; thrash; pommel; cudgel; belabor; conquer; defeat; vanquish; overcome.


Beat  v. i.  (past beat; past part. beaten; pres. part. beating)  
1.
To strike repeatedly; to inflict repeated blows; to knock vigorously or loudly. "The men of the city... beat at the door."
2.
To move with pulsation or throbbing. "A thousand hearts beat happily."
3.
To come or act with violence; to dash or fall with force; to strike anything, as rain, wind, and waves do. "Sees rolling tempests vainly beat below." "They (winds) beat at the crazy casement." "The sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die." "Public envy seemeth to beat chiefly upon ministers."
4.
To be in agitation or doubt. (Poetic) "To still my beating mind."
5.
(Naut.) To make progress against the wind, by sailing in a zigzag line or traverse.
6.
To make a sound when struck; as, the drums beat.
7.
(Mil.) To make a succession of strokes on a drum; as, the drummers beat to call soldiers to their quarters.
8.
(Acoustics & Mus.) To sound with more or less rapid alternations of greater and less intensity, so as to produce a pulsating effect; said of instruments, tones, or vibrations, not perfectly in unison.
A beating wind (Naut.), a wind which necessitates tacking in order to make progress.
To beat about, to try to find; to search by various means or ways.
To beat about the bush, to approach a subject circuitously.
To beat up and down (Hunting), to run first one way and then another; said of a stag.
To beat up for recruits, to go diligently about in order to get helpers or participators in an enterprise.
To beat the rap, to be acquitted of an accusation; especially, by some sly or deceptive means, rather than to be proven innocent.


noun
Beat  n.  
1.
A stroke; a blow. "He, with a careless beat, Struck out the mute creation at a heat."
2.
A recurring stroke; a throb; a pulsation; as, a beat of the heart; the beat of the pulse.
3.
(Mus.)
(a)
The rise or fall of the hand or foot, marking the divisions of time; a division of the measure so marked. In the rhythm of music the beat is the unit.
(b)
A transient grace note, struck immediately before the one it is intended to ornament.
4.
(Acoustics & Mus.) A sudden swelling or reenforcement of a sound, recurring at regular intervals, and produced by the interference of sound waves of slightly different periods of vibrations; applied also, by analogy, to other kinds of wave motions; the pulsation or throbbing produced by the vibrating together of two tones not quite in unison. See Beat, v. i., 8.
5.
A round or course which is frequently gone over; as, a watchman's beat; analogously, for newspaper reporters, the subject or territory that they are assigned to cover; as, the Washington beat.
6.
A place of habitual or frequent resort.
7.
A cheat or swindler of the lowest grade; often emphasized by dead; as, a dead beat; also, deadbeat. (Low)
Beat of drum (Mil.), a succession of strokes varied, in different ways, for particular purposes, as to regulate a march, to call soldiers to their arms or quarters, to direct an attack, or retreat, etc.
Beat of a watch, or Beat of a clock, the stroke or sound made by the action of the escapement. A clock is in beat or out of beat, according as the stroke is at equal or unequal intervals.


Beat  n.  
1.
One that beats, or surpasses, another or others; as, the beat of him. (Colloq.)
2.
The act of one that beats a person or thing; as:
(a)
(Newspaper Cant) The act of obtaining and publishing a piece of news by a newspaper before its competitors; also, the news itself; also called a scoop or exclusive. "It's a beat on the whole country."
(b)
(Hunting) The act of scouring, or ranging over, a tract of land to rouse or drive out game; also, those so engaged, collectively. "Driven out in the course of a beat." "Bears coming out of holes in the rocks at the last moment, when the beat is close to them."
(c)
(Fencing) A smart tap on the adversary's blade.


adjective
Beat  adj.  Weary; tired; fatigued; exhausted. (Colloq.) "Quite beat, and very much vexed and disappointed."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Beat" Quotes from Famous Books



... it that the Prince said," he asked, "when the first of those water-carriers came down the steps and did not slip? He beat his hands upon the balustrade of the balcony and cried out some words. It seemed to me that his companion warned him of your presence, and that he stopped ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... commission to command the horse, he went along with him. His first service was against Aristobulus, who had prevailed with the Jews to rebel. Here he was himself the first man to scale the largest of the works, and beat Aristobulus out of all of them; after which he routed, in a pitched battle, an army many times over the number of his, killed almost all of them, and took Aristobulus and his son prisoners. This war ended, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... has tarried by the way, and all the adventures and vicissitudes that befell him on the journey—can we ever hope to know these things? In any case, man has his antecedents; life has its antecedents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent cause, which again has its antecedent. We can thus traverse the chain of causation only to find it is an endless chain; the separate links we can examine, but the first link ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... all the Northwestern country for us. As soon as the Northwest Fur Company found out that Lewis and Clark intended to cross the Rockies to the Columbia, they sent word East, and that company sent one of their best men, Simon Fraser, to ascend the Saskatchewan and beat the Americans in on the Columbia. But he himself was beaten in that great race by about a couple of years! So we forged the chain that was to hold the Oregon country to the United States afterward. Oh yes, our young captains had a big game to play, ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... sea; "from this eminence," Suetonius gravely tells us, "after the application of long drawn-out and exquisite tortures, Tiberius used to order his executioners to fling their victims before his eyes into the water, where boats full of mariners, stationed below, were waiting in readiness to beat the bruised bodies with oars, in case any spark of life might yet be left in them." The terrible legend fits in aptly with the appearance of this forbidding dizzy precipice, especially on a dark ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan


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