Word.ws English Dictionary

bad to beat

bad to beat adjective: difficult to beat; sure to succeed.

Adjective

bad to beat (not comparable)

  1. (archaic, slang) Difficult to beat; sure to succeed.
    • "But, you see, they know nothing of discipline. If they'd only form reg'lar, and stand firm in a square, they'd be bad to beat, as them dogs of robbers would find."1861, Anne Bowman, Among the Tartar Tents, Or, The Lost Fathers, page 183
    • Twenty-one yearling fillies faced the judges, and in this competition Mr. Clark's Silver Queen was an easy first, and with a little more flesh and condition will be bad to beat.1886, The Breeder's Gazette, page 274

Origin of bad to beat

Compare the phrase "beat badly"; see badly (“very much; to a great degree”).

Questions about bad to beat

What does bad to beat mean?
Bad to beat means difficult to beat; sure to succeed.
What part of speech is bad to beat?
Bad to beat is an adjective.

Words near bad to beat in the dictionary

  1. bad temperedness
  2. bad tempers
  3. Bad Thing
  4. Bad Things
  5. bad things come in threes
  6. bad to beat
  7. bad touch
  8. bad touched
  9. bad touches
  10. bad touching
  11. bad trip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bad to beat (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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