beat

—beatable, adj.

/beet/, v., beat, beaten or beat, beating, n., adj.

v.t.

1. to strike violently or forcefully and repeatedly.

2. to dash against: rain beating the trees.

3. to flutter, flap, or rotate in or against: beating the air with its wings.

4. to sound, as on a drum: beating a steady rhythm; to beat a tattoo.

5. to stir vigorously: Beat the egg whites well.

6. to break, forge, or make by blows: to beat their swords into plowshares.

7. to produce (an attitude, idea, habit, etc.) by repeated efforts: I'll beat some sense into him.

8. to make (a path) by repeated treading.

9. to strike (a person or animal) repeatedly and injuriously: Some of the hoodlums beat their victims viciously before robbing them.

10. Music. to mark (time) by strokes, as with the hand or a metronome.

11. Hunting. to scour (the forest, grass, or brush), and sometimes make noise, in order to rouse game.

12. to overcome in a contest; defeat.

13. to win over in a race: We beat the English challenger to Bermuda.

14. to be superior to: Making reservations beats waiting in line.

15. to be incomprehensible to; baffle: It beats me how he got the job.

16. to defeat or frustrate (a person), as a problem to be solved: It beats me how to get her to understand.

17. to mitigate or offset the effects of: beating the hot weather; trying to beat the sudden decrease in land values.

18. Slang. to swindle; cheat (often fol. by out): He beat him out of hundreds of dollars on that deal.

19. to escape or avoid (blame or punishment).

20. Textiles. to strike (the loose pick) into its proper place in the woven cloth by beating the loosely deposited filling yarn with the reed.

v.i.

21. to strike repeated blows; pound.

22. to throb or pulsate: His heart began to beat faster.

23. to dash; strike (usually fol. by against or on): rain beating against the windows.

24. to resound under blows, as a drum.

25. to achieve victory in a contest; win: Which team do you think will beat?

26. to play, as on a drum.

27. to scour cover for game.

28. Physics. to make a beat or beats.

29. (of a cooking ingredient) to foam or stiffen as a result of beating or whipping: This cream won't beat.

30. Naut. to tack to windward by sailing close-hauled.

31. beat about,

a. to search through; scour: After beating about for several hours, he turned up the missing papers.

b. Naut. to tack into the wind.

32. beat all, Informal. to surpass anything of a similar nature, esp. in an astonishing or outrageous way: The way he came in here and ordered us around beats all!

33. beat a retreat. See retreat (def. 8).

34. beat around or about the bush. See bush¹ (def. 14).

35. beat back, to force back; compel to withdraw: to beat back an attacker.

36. beat down,

a. to bring into subjection; subdue.

b. Informal. to persuade (a seller) to lower the price of something: His first price was too high, so we tried to beat him down.

37. beat it, Informal. to depart; go away: He was pestering me, so I told him to beat it.

38. beat off,

a. to ward off; repulse: We had to beat off clouds of mosquitoes.

b. Slang (vulgar). to masturbate.

39. beat out,

a. Informal. to defeat; win or be chosen over: to beat out the competition.

b. Carpentry. to cut (a mortise).

c. to produce hurriedly, esp. by writing or typing: There are three days left to beat out the first draft of the novel.

d. Baseball. (of a hitter) to make (an infield ground ball or bunt) into a hit: He beat out a weak grounder to third.

40. beat the air or wind, to make repeated futile attempts.

41. beat the rap. See rap¹ (def. 16).

42. beat up,

a. Also, beat up on. to strike repeatedly so as to cause painful injury; thrash: A gang of toughs beat him up on the way home from school. In the third round the champion really began to beat up on the challenger.

b. Brit. Informal. to find or gather; scare up: I'll beat up some lunch for us while you make out the shopping list.

n.

43. a stroke or blow.

44. the sound made by one or more such blows: the beat of drums.

45. a throb or pulsation: a pulse of 60 beats per minute.

46. the ticking sound made by a clock or watch escapement.

47. one's assigned or regular path or habitual round: a policeman's beat.

48. Music.

a. the audible, visual, or mental marking of the metrical divisions of music.

b. a stroke of the hand, baton, etc., marking the time division or an accent for music during performance.

49. Theat. a momentary time unit imagined by an actor in timing actions: Wait four beats and then pick up the phone.

50. Pros. the accent stress, or ictus, in a foot or rhythmical unit of poetry.

51. Physics. a pulsation caused by the coincidence of the amplitudes of two oscillations of unequal frequencies, having a frequency equal to the difference between the frequencies of the two oscillations.

52. Journalism.

a. the reporting of a piece of news in advance, esp. before it is reported by a rival or rivals. Cf. exclusive (def. 13), scoop (def. 8).

b. Also called newsbeat, run. the particular news source or activity that a reporter is responsible for covering.

53. a subdivision of a county, as in Mississippi.

54. (often cap.) Informal. beatnik.

55. off one's beat, outside of one's routine, general knowledge, or range of experience: He protested that nonobjective art was off his beat.

56. on the beat, in the correct rhythm or tempo: By the end of the number they were all finally playing on the beat.

adj.

57. Informal. exhausted; worn out.

58. (often cap.) of or characteristic of members of the Beat Generation or beatniks.

[bef. 900; ME beten, OE beatan; c. ON bauta, MLG boten, OHG bozzan; akin to MIr búalaim I hit, L fustis a stick < *bheud-]

Syn. 1. belabor, batter, drub, maul, baste, pommel, cudgel, buffet, flog. BEAT, HIT, POUND, STRIKE, THRASH refer to the giving of a blow or blows. BEAT implies the giving of repeated blows: to beat a rug. To HIT is usually to give a single blow, definitely directed: to hit a ball. To POUND is to give heavy and repeated blows, often with the fist: to pound a nail, the table. To STRIKE is to give one or more forceful blows suddenly or swiftly: to strike a gong. To THRASH implies inflicting repeated blows as punishment, to show superior strength, and the like: to thrash a child. 12. conquer, subdue, vanquish, overpower. 14. excel, outdo, surpass. 22. See pulsate.

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In physics, the pulsation resulting from a combination of two waves of slightly different frequency.

Beat frequency is the difference between the frequencies of the combining waves. When the interfering frequencies are in the audible range, the beats are heard as alternating soft and loud pulses. The human ear can detect beats with frequencies up to 10 hertz, or 10 beats per second. Piano tuners listen for beats when comparing the pitch of a tuning fork to that of a vibrating string; when no beats are heard, the fork and string are at the same frequency. Ultrasonic or inaudible frequencies can be superimposed to produce audible beats, allowing the detection of vocal sounds produced by bats or dolphins.

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▪ music

      in music, the basic rhythmic unit of a measure, or bar, not to be confused with rhythm as such; nor is the beat necessarily identical with the underlying pulse of a given piece of music, which may extend over more than a single beat. The number and relative positions of accented and unaccented beats furnish the basis of proper metric articulation, with the strongest accent usually falling on the first beat after the bar line. In Western musical notation the number of beats to the measure is indicated by the upper figure of the time signature at the beginning of a musical composition, while the time value of each separate beat (e.g., a quarter or eighth note) is indicated by the lower figure. See also metre; rhythm.

▪ waves

 in physics, the pulsation caused by the combination of two waves of slightly different frequencies. The principle of beats for sound waves can be demonstrated on a piano by striking a white key and an adjacent black key at the bass end of the keyboard. The resulting sound is alternately soft and loud—that is, having characteristic pulsations, or throbs, called beats. Toward the treble end of the keyboard, the beat frequency is greater because the difference in frequency of adjacent keys is more than at the lower end. The Figure—> depicts two waves n₁ and n₂ with respective frequencies of 24 and 30 vibrations per second (hertz); the beat frequency N is their difference, 6 beats per second.

      The phenomenon of beats is employed in various ways. For example, in the tuning (tuning and temperament) of instruments, if a tuning fork and piano key of the same note are struck simultaneously and no beat is heard, then they are of identical pitch. Ultrasonic vibrations (having a frequency higher than is audible), such as the vocal sounds made by bats and dolphins, may be detected by superimposing a sound of different frequency to produce audible beats. The principle is also used in the superheterodyne reception of radio waves, in which a low-frequency signal from an oscillator is beat against an incoming high-frequency radio signal to produce an intermediate (beat) frequency that can be amplified to produce audible signals.

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