Word.ws English Dictionary

beach

/biːt͡ʃ/

beach noun: the shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly. Also the euphemistic form of bitch.

beach: the shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly
Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

beach (plural beaches)

  1. The shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly.
    • Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path[…]. It twisted and turned,[…]and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn. And, back of the lawn, was a big, old-fashioned house, with piazzas stretching in front of it, and all blazing with lights. 'Twas the house I'd seen the roof of from the beach.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
  2. A horizontal strip of land, usually sandy, adjoining water.
    • Up and down, the beach lay empty for miles.1988, Robert Ferro, Second Son
    Synonyms:
    backshore, sand, strand
  3. (Kent, UK, dialectal, Sussex) The loose pebbles of the seashore, especially worn by waves; shingle.
  4. (euphemistic) Synonym of gravel trap.
    Synonyms:
    gravel trap
  5. A dry, dusty pitch or situation, as though playing on sand.
    • I never realised Lincoln was a seaside town. BRIAN LAWS Scunthorpe manager, after losing on a liberally sanded beach of a pitch2008, Phil Shaw, The Book of Football Quotations, page 415
    • The series was brought to an ironic conclusion when England became hoist by their own petard, as they lost the deciding final Test on a 'beach' of a wicket. Neither side batted well.2012, Tim Quelch, Bent Arms & Dodgy Wickets

Verb

beach (third-person singular simple present beaches, present participle beaching, simple past and past participle beached)

  1. (intransitive) To run aground on a beach.
    • When we finally beached, the land was scarcely less wet than the sea.1941, Emily Carr, “Salt Water”, in Klee Wyck
  2. (transitive) To run (something) aground on a beach.
    • It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Chapter 90”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
    • Great Aías led twelve ships from Sálamis
      and beached them where Athenians formed for battle.1974, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Iliad, Doubleday, Book Two, lines 530-31, p. 53
  3. To run into an obstacle or rough or soft ground, so that the floor of the vehicle rests on the ground and the wheels cannot gain traction.

Proper noun capitalized: Beach

Beach (countable and uncountable, plural Beachs or Beaches)

  1. A surname.
    • “The commissioner does not affect the numbers,’’ Beach said. “They don’t collect the data. They don’t massage the data. They don’t organize it.”2025 August 13, Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak, “Trump’s nominee to oversee jobs and inflation data faces shower of criticism”, in AP News, archived from the original on 15 Aug 2025
    1. A surname from English
    2. A surname from landforms
    3. A surname from German
  2. A hamlet in Bitton parish, South Gloucestershire district, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom (OS grid ref ST7070).
  3. An unincorporated community in Ware County, Georgia.
  4. An unincorporated community in Webster County, Missouri.
  5. A small city, the county seat of Golden Valley County, North Dakota.
  6. An unincorporated community on Lummi Island, Whatcom County, Washington.

Also used as

beach is also the euphemistic form of bitch.

beach meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

beach in Hindi

sandy shore
समुद्रतट samudrataṭ, सागरतट sāgartaṭ, तट taṭ, किनारा kinārā, किनार kinār, साहिल sāhil

beach in Tamil

sandy shore
கடற்கரை kaṭaṟkarai

beach in Marathi

sandy shore
वाळवंट vāḷvaṇṭa, पुळण puḷaṇ

beach in Urdu

sandy shore
ساحِلِ سَمُنْدَر sāhil-i samundar, ساحِل sāhil
More languagesFewer languages
beach in Bengali
সমুদ্রতট śomudrotoṭ
beach in Telugu
బీచ్ bīc
beach in Malayalam
സമുദ്രതീരം samudratīraṁ, കടൽക്കര kaṭalkkara, കടൽപ്പുറം kaṭalppuṟaṁ
beach in Kannada
ಕಡಲತೀರ kaḍalatīra
beach in Punjabi
ਸਮੁਂਦਰ-ਤੱਟ samundra-taṭṭa, ਬੀਚ bīc
beach in Gujarati
સમુદ્રતટ samudrataṭ
beach in Odia
ସମୁଦ୍ର କୂଳ samudra kuḷa, ବେଳା ଭୂମି beḷā bhumi
beach in Sanskrit
तीर tīra, सागरतीरं sāgaratīraṃ
beach in Nepali
समुद्रतट samudrataṭ, तिर् tir, बगर् bagar, रेति reti
beach in Tagalog
dalampasigan
beach in Arabic
شَاطِئ šāṭiʔ, سَاحِل sāḥil
beach in Malay
pantai
beach in Indonesian
pantai
beach in Thai
หาด hàat, ชายหาด chaai-hàat
beach in Vietnamese
bãi biển
beach in Myanmar
ကမ်းခြေ kam:hkre

Examples of beach in a sentence

  • The reasons for our failure were as uncountable as the grains of sand on a beach.
  • On sunny days the beaches draw armies of tourists of all kinds.
  • The news that a hurricane had destroyed our beach house killed our plans to sell it.

All 40 example sentences with beach

Synonyms of beach

Forms of beach

Noun
pluralbeaches
Verb
third-person singular presentbeaches
present participlebeaching
past participlebeached
pastbeached
Proper noun
pluralBeachs
pluralBeaches

Past tense of beach: beached

Plural of beach: beaches

Origin of beach

From Middle English bache, bæcche (“bank, sandbank”), from Old English beċe (“beck, brook, stream”), from Proto-West Germanic *baki, from Proto-Germanic *bakiz (“brook”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeg- (“flowing water”). Cognates Cognate with Cimbrian pach (“brook, creek, stream”), Dutch beek (“brook, stream”), German Bach (“brook, stream”), German Low German Beek (“brook, stream”), Luxembourgish Baach (“brook, stream”), Mòcheno pòch (“brook, creek, stream”), Vilamovian bāh, baoch (“brook, stream”), Danish bæk (“brook”), Icelandic bekkur (“creek, spring, stream”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk bekk (“brook, creek, stream”), Swedish bäck (“brook, creek, stream”); also Lithuanian banga (“billow, wave”). More at batch, beck.

English surname reflecting multiple origins, including the nouns beach and beech, and Americanized from the German surname Bisch.

Words formed from beach

Phrases with beach

159 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with beach

17 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about beach

What does beach mean?
Beach means the shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly.
What is beach in Hindi?
Beach in Hindi is समुद्रतट (samudrataṭ), सागरतट (sāgartaṭ), तट (taṭ). See Beach meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is beach?
Beach can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce beach?
Beach is pronounced /biːt͡ʃ/.
What is the plural of beach?
The plural of beach is beaches.

Words near beach in the dictionary

  1. beables
  2. Beabout
  3. Beabouts
  4. beabull
  5. beacause
  6. beach
  7. beach apple
  8. beach apples
  9. beach bag
  10. beach bags
  11. beach ball

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beach (page history and authors); Beach (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-beach.ogg, en-us-beach.ogg.

Cite this entry: “beach.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/beach. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.