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say it: di-FEET
defeat is a noun and verb meaning "an unsuccessful ending to a struggle or contest". It is pronounced /dɪˈfit/ — di-FEET. It carries 4 recorded senses.
an unsuccessful ending to a struggle or contest
“it was a narrow defeat”
“the army's only defeat”
“they suffered a convincing licking”
the feeling that accompanies an experience of being thwarted in attaining your goals
thwart the passage of
“kill a motion”
“he shot down the student's proposal”
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 defeat 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.