beat – English noun declension

English noun forms of beat

Noun: beat
Singularbeat
Pluralbeats

Sample Sentences

  • 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:]
  • a beat of the heart
  • the beat of the pulse
  • With each beat, your heart's left ventricle pumps blood into your arteries, which are all different sizes. [2026, Ginny Graves, “The Most Important Health Metric You're Not Tracking”, in Men's Health, volume 41, number 2, page 19:]
  • I love watching her dance to a pretty drum beat with a bouncy rhythm!
  • to walk the beat
  • 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:]
  • It's a beat on the whole country. [1898, unknown author, Scribner's Magazine, volume 24:]
  • the beat of him
  • a dead beat
  • “If I get away I sha’n’t be here,” I says, “to prove these rapscallions ain’t your uncles, and I couldn’t do it if I was here. I could swear they was beats and bummers, that’s all, though that’s worth something. [1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter XXVIII, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC:]
  • Bears coming out of holes in the rocks at the last moment, when the beat is close to them. [1911, Hedley Peek, Frederick George Aflalo, Encyclopaedia of Sport:]
  • She made sure to give fans all the details about her beat in the caption. [2018, Leah Prinzivalli, “Kylie Jenner Shared a Sneak Peek of Her New Kylie Cosmetics Blush on Instagram”, in Allure:]

Etymology

1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Indo-European *bʰew-der.?
3. Proto-Germanic *bautaną
4. Proto-West Germanic *bautan
5. Old English bēatan
6. Middle English beten
7. English beat
8. 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”).
9. Cognates
10. 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”). See: Old English Nouns 'bēatan', Latin Nouns 'fūstis'.

Verbs referencing "beat"

Dutch Nouns beat, Romanian Nouns beat, German Nouns Butt, Finnish Nouns biitti, Zulu Nouns ibhithi, German Nouns Beat.