beat up
Phrasal verbbeats up, beating up, beat up, beaten up
Formsbeats up, beating up, beat up, beaten up
- 1To assault someone violently with repeated blows, giving them a severe beating.
A gang of teenagers beat up a delivery driver and stole his bike.
He got badly beaten up outside a bar and spent two nights in the hospital.
Similarassault, attack, thrash, batter
Note
The verb is separable: a noun object can follow up or sit inside the phrase (beat up a stranger, beat a stranger up), but a pronoun must go in the middle; beat him up, never beat up him. The passive often takes get, as in got beaten up, and casual American speech also uses beat up as the participle.
- 2To blame oneself harshly and feel very guilty over or about something.
He's still beating himself up over the penalty he missed in the final.
Parents often beat themselves up about choices that were never really theirs to make.
- 3Worn out from heavy use and in poor condition; battered by time and wear.
She learned to play on a beat-up guitar she found at a yard sale.
The paperback was so beat-up that half the pages had come loose.
Similarbattered, worn, shabby, tattered
Note
The adjective keeps the short participle (beat-up rather than beaten-up) and is hyphenated before a noun: a beat-up guitar, a beat-up paperback. It is said chiefly of objects worn down by time and use, and it compares with more and most: a more beat-up copy, the most beat-up car on the lot.
- 4To cause injuries like those of a severe beating, but by some other means, such as a fall or crash.
The rider was thrown into a fence and beat himself up badly enough to spend a week in the hospital.
Ten hours of pounding waves beat up the crew, leaving everyone bruised and sore.
Similarbatter
Note
Here the damage comes from a crash, a fall or a pounding sea rather than from fists. When the verb is reflexive (a pilot who flies into a hill and beats himself up) it shares its words with the self-blaming meaning, so the sentence needs the hill, the fence or the bruises in view, or the listener will hear guilt instead of injury.
- 5To make someone feel very guilty by blaming them harshly for something.
Don't let your in-laws beat you up over skipping Thanksgiving this year.
My father still beats me up over the time I wrecked his car, twenty years later.
Similartorment
Note
The blame comes from outside here, where the reflexive meaning keeps it within: a parent or a conscience does the beating. Rachel Platten's 2015 song "Beating Me Up" plays on the double sense, wishing her heart would stop: stop beating, and stop beating her up.
- 6A beating, or a rough hazing given to a newcomer.
Senior cadets used to give the first-years a beat up on their first night at the academy.
Witnesses told police the beat up lasted several minutes before anyone stepped in.
Note
The noun can name a ritual rather than a brawl: in John Golley's Jet, senior cadets hold beat ups on guest nights and single out first-term cadets one by one, and a hazing can even be a mock beat-up that hurts no one. Print writes this noun and the phrase's other nouns both open and hyphenated: beat ups, beat-ups.
- 7An alarm or outcry that is artificially or dishonestly stirred up, especially by or through the media.
Ministers dismissed reports of a crisis in the hospitals as a tabloid beat up designed to sell papers.
People in the town are tired of media beat ups that paint them as lawless.
Similarscare
Note
Calling a story a beat up waves it away: the fuss, the speaker says, was cooked up rather than found. The word belongs to British, Australian and New Zealand English and often carries a qualifier naming who did the stirring: a media beat up, a journalistic beat-up. It is written both open and hyphenated; the plural is beat ups.
- 8To sail into the wind by making a series of alternate tacks across it.
With the breeze dead ahead, the schooner beat up toward the harbor mouth for most of the afternoon.
We spent three hours beating up against a stiff northerly before we reached the anchorage.
Similartack
Note
Sailing has its own uphill: a boat cannot head straight into the wind, so it gains ground against it on a zigzag, each tack crossing the wind at an angle. Unlike the violent verb, this one takes no object; the boat simply beats up, usually with a direction after it: toward the harbor mouth, against a stiff northerly.
- 9Someone who has been beaten up, or something that has been battered in the same way.
Well, two beat ups (the bullied kids) would split that cash fifty-fifty.
2009, Thomas Cody Mullenaux, Numbskull - 10To wake up earlier than another person does.
I set two alarms so I could beat my roommate up and get the first shower.
However early I get up, my grandmother has beaten me up and is already out walking the dog.
- 11A military raid on an enemy position or target.
Their orders were to make a beat up on the supply dump at night and slip back into the desert.
After the third beat up in a week, the enemy doubled the guard on every fuel depot.
Similarraid
Note
British soldiers used it for the hit-and-run raid: strike, do damage, and be gone before the enemy can answer. Special forces patrols in the North African desert of the 1940s called their attacks beat-ups, and the word sits beside the airmen's bombing verb as slang of the same war.
- 12To bomb a military target or targets again and again.
Night after night the squadron beat up the rail yards until no train could move through them.
The pilots were told to keep beating up the coastal guns until the landing craft were ashore.
Note
Pilots of the Second World War used it for a target struck run after run. As with a beating with fists, the force lies in repetition: rail yards or coastal guns are hit again and again rather than once and left. It belongs to that air war and its histories, so a modern sentence needs the aircraft in view to be read this way.
- 13To disturb someone, or to call on them at an untimely hour.
A party of cousins beat up the household on Christmas Eve, long after everyone had gone to bed.
Forgive me for beating you up at this hour, but the news could not wait until morning.
Similardisturb
Note
Time has made this use dated, and today it needs a clear setting. Because the violent meaning is the one every reader knows, "they beat us up at midnight" will be heard as an assault unless the visitors, their reason for calling or an apology make the visit plain.
- 14To go about energetically in search of helpers or participants for an undertaking.
The sergeant was sent into the farming towns to beat up for recruits.
The organizers beat up for helpers all over the parish before the harvest supper.
Similarcanvass
Note
The construction is fixed in this dated use: beat up for, followed by the people wanted; recruits, volunteers, helpers. There is no direct object, so the helpers always come after for, and the effort lies in going around in person, town to town or across a parish, rather than in simply asking.
- 15A tree planted in a plantation later than the others around it.
A dry summer killed many seedlings, and the gaps were filled with beat ups the following winter.
Foresters noted that each beat up was still a meter shorter than its older neighbors.
Note
Foresters use it for the trees that fill the gaps where a first planting failed, and the replanting itself is called beating up. Because they go in later, beat-ups stand shorter than their neighbors and are often measured and recorded apart from the original trees.
- 16To attack an enemy suddenly, or to throw them into alarm.
Before first light the cavalry beat up the enemy's quarters, scattering men who had been asleep minutes earlier.
At breach of wall, or hedge surprise, / She shared i' th' hazard, and the prize: / At beating quarters up, or forage, / Behaved herself with matchless courage
1663, Samuel Butler, HudibrasNote
Here is an old soldier's phrase, and its usual object was the enemy's quarters: to beat up quarters was to fall without warning on troops at rest and throw their camp into alarm. Samuel Butler's Hudibras has it in 1663, and Anthony Wayne, writing from camp in 1777, reports that the enemy "threaten to beat up our Quarters".
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