- 1
A stroke; a blow.
- He, […]with a careless beat, / Struck out the mute creation at a heat.
- 2
A pulsation or throb.
- a beat of the heart
- the beat of the pulse
- 3
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.
- 4
A rhythm.
- I love watching her dance to a pretty drum beat with a bouncy rhythm!
- 5
A rhythm.; The rhythm signalled by a conductor or other musician to the members of a group of musicians.
- 6
The instrumental portion of a piece of hip-hop music.
- 7
The interference between two tones of almost equal frequency.
- 8
A short pause in a play, screenplay, or teleplay, for dramatic or comedic effect.
- 9
An area of a person's responsibility, especially; The route patrolled by a police officer or a guard.broadly
- to walk the beat
- 10
An area of a person's responsibility, especially; The primary focus of a reporter's stories (such as police/courts, education, city government, business etc.).broadly
- As an adult, I became a journalist whose beat is the environment. In a way, I’ve turned my youthful preoccupations into a profession.
beat
- 1
To hit; to strike.transitive
- 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.
- 2
To strike or pound repeatedly, usually in some sort of rhythm.transitive
- He danced hypnotically while she beat the atabaque.
- 3
To strike repeatedly; to inflict repeated blows; to knock vigorously or loudly.intransitive
- […] the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door […]
- The sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die.
- 4
To move with pulsation or throbbing.intransitive
- A thousand hearts beat happily.
- O heart, how fares it with thee now, That thou should’st fail from thy desire, Who scarcely darest to inquire, ‘What is it makes me beat so low?’
- 5
To win against; to defeat or overcome; to do or be better than (someone); to excel in a particular, competitive event.transitive
- Jan had little trouble beating John in tennis. He lost five games in a row.
- No matter how quickly Joe finished his test, Roger always beat him.
- 6
To sail to windward using a series of alternate tacks across the wind.intransitive
- 7
To strike (water, foliage etc.) in order to drive out game; to travel through (a forest etc.) for hunting.transitive
- The part of the wood to be beaten for deer sloped all the way from the roadside to the loch.
- 8
To mix food in a rapid fashion. Compare whip.
- Beat the eggs and whip the cream.
- 9
To persuade the seller to reduce a price.UKtransitive
- He wanted $50 for it, but I managed to beat him down to $35.
- 10
To indicate by beating or drumming.transitive
- to beat a retreat; to beat to quarters
- 1
simple past tense of beat
- 2
past participle of beatcolloquialespeciallyform-of
- 1
Exhausted.USslang
- After the long day, she was feeling completely beat.
- 2
Dilapidated, beat up.slang
- Dude, you drive a beat car like that and you ain’t gonna get no honeys.
- 3
Having impressively attractive makeup.
- Her face was beat for the gods!
- 4
Boring.slang
- 5
Ugly.slang
- 1
A beatnik.
- The beats were pioneers with no destination, changing the world one impulse at a time.
- 1
Relating to the Beat Generation.
- beat poetry