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say it: beet
beat is a verb, noun and adjective meaning "come out better in a competition, race, or conflict". It carries 34 recorded senses.
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”
“The teacher used to beat the students”
strike (a part of one's own body) repeatedly, as in great emotion or in accompaniment to music
“beat one's breast”
“beat one's foot rhythmically”
strike (water or bushes) repeatedly to rouse animals for hunting
the basic rhythmic unit in a piece of music
“the piece has a fast rhythm”
“the conductor set the beat”
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 act of beating to windward; sailing as close as possible to the direction from which the wind is blowing
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for beat come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.