Word Type
Beat can be an adjective, a verb or a noun.
beat used as an adjective:
- (gay slang) fabulous
"Her makeup was beat!" - exhausted
"After the long day, she was feeling completely beat."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
beat used as a verb:
- To hit; to knock; to pound; to strike.
"As soon as she heard the news, she went into a rage and beat the wall with her fists until her knuckles bled." - To strike or pound repeatedly, usually in some sort of rhythm.
"He danced hypnotically while she beat the atabaque." - To win against; to defeat or overcome; to do better than, outdo, or excel someone in a particular, competitive event.
"Jan had little trouble beating John in tennis. He lost five games in a row." - To sail to windward using a series of alternate tacks across the wind.
- To mix food in a rapid fashion. Compare whip.
"Beat the eggs and whip the cream." - (impersonal): It beats X Y = X cannot understand Y, where Y is an indirect question.
"(said by Fred Dibnah): It beats me how she [= the Queen] keeps tabs on everybody"
Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →
beat used as a noun:
- A pulsation or throb.
- 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.
- A rhythm.
- The interference between two tones of almost equal frequency
- A pause with the camera focused on one shot, often a characters face (often used in screenplays/teleplays).
- The route of a patrol by a guard or officer as in walk the beat.
- In newspapering, the primary focus of a reporter's stories (such as police/courts, education, city government, business etc.).
- A small part of a dramatic play.
- The instrumental portion of a piece of hip-hop music.
- A beatnik.
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is beat?
- Adjective usage: Her makeup was beat!
- Adjective usage: After the long day, she was feeling completely beat.
- Verb usage: As soon as she heard the news, she went into a rage and beat the wall with her fists until her knuckles bled.
- Verb usage: He danced hypnotically while she beat the atabaque.
- Verb usage: Jan had little trouble beating John in tennis. He lost five games in a row.
- Verb usage: No matter how quickly Joe finished his test, Roger always beat him.
- Verb usage: I just can't seem to beat the last level of this video game.
- Verb usage: Beat the eggs and whip the cream.
- Verb usage: (said by Fred Dibnah): It beats me how she [= the Queen] keeps tabs on everybody
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of beat are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of beat, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
