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beat has 56 distinct synonyms spread across 19 of its 34 senses. Each sense below keeps its own list, because a synonym belongs to a meaning and not to a word: swapping one sense's substitute into another sense's sentence is how a thesaurus makes writing worse. WordNet records no antonym for it — antonymy is a relation between word forms rather than concepts, so it is deliberately sparse.
Counts are distinct word forms across every sense. A synonym that appears under three senses is counted once here and shown three times below, under each sense it belongs to.
come out better in a competition, race, or conflict
“Agassi beat Becker in the tennis championship”
give a beating to; subject to a beating, either as a punishment or as an act of aggression
“Thugs beat him up when he walked down the street late at night”
glare or strike with great intensity
“The sun was beating down on us”
sail with much tacking or with difficulty
“The boat beat in the strong wind”
strike (a part of one's own body) repeatedly, as in great emotion or in accompaniment to music
“beat one's breast”
be superior
“Reading beats watching television”
indicate by beating, as with the fingers or drumsticks
“Beat the rhythm”
make by pounding or trampling
“beat a path through the forest”
produce a rhythm by striking repeatedly
“beat the drum”
the basic rhythmic unit in a piece of music
“the piece has a fast rhythm”
a single pulsation of an oscillation produced by adding two waves of different frequencies; has a frequency equal to the difference between the two oscillations
a member of the beat generation; a nonconformist in dress and behavior
the sound of stroke or blow
“he heard the beat of a drum”
(prosody) the accent in a metrical foot of verse
a regular rate of repetition
“the cox raised the beat”
a stroke or blow
“the signal was two beats on the steam pipe”
the act of beating to windward; sailing as close as possible to the direction from which the wind is blowing
1 of the 34 recorded senses carries no synonym, antonym or related term, so it is not shown above. Every sense, with its definition and examples, is on the full entry for beat.
Synonyms, antonyms and the broader and narrower relations for beat come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Full sources and licences.