Definition
nounA pulsation or throb.
Sentence Examples
He won't beat me.
I beat him completely in the debate.
We beat about for a solution to the problem.
Word Origin & History
Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *bʰew-der.?
Proto-Germanic *bautaną
Proto-West Germanic *bautan
Old English bēatan
Middle English beten
English beat
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”).
Cognates
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”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"He, […]with a careless beat, / Struck out the mute creation at a heat."
— 1687, [John Dryden], “(please specify the page number)”, in The Hind and the Panther. A Poem, in Three Parts, 2nd edition, London: […] Jacob Tonson […], →OCLC:
"There has been a bad business during the night at 3, Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road. Our man on the beat saw a light there about two in the morning, and as the house was an empty one, suspected that something was amiss."
— 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter 3, in A Study in Scarlet:
"[…]the rise of embedding police into schools – so-called School Resource Officers (SROs), who are employed by the local police, but whose “beat” is a school. Those officers report to the local police department and not the school, and can, and frequently do, have different priorities."
— 2019 January 29, Mike Masnick, “How My High School Destroyed An Immigrant Kid's Life Because He Drew The School's Mascot”, in Techdirt:
""We are looking at being able to fly [drones] tens of miles from base, which is going to make a huge difference. It is the equivalent of having bobbies on the beat.""
— 2025 July 23, Paul Clifton, “Air force: drones' developing railway role”, in RAIL, number 1040, page 31:
"As an adult, I became a journalist whose beat is the environment. In a way, I’ve turned my youthful preoccupations into a profession."
— 2020 April, Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why we won't avoid a climate catastrophehttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/04/why-we-wont-avoid-a-climate-catastrophe-feature/”, in National Geographic: