Word.ws English Dictionary

beat-up

beat-up adjective: worn out by overuse; in a state of disrepair.

Adjective

beat-up (comparative more beat-up, superlative most beat-up)

  1. (informal) Worn out by overuse; in a state of disrepair

Noun

beat-up (plural beat-ups)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand) An artificially or disingenuously manufactured outcry, usually in the media.
    • “It has been suggested that this is a vicious book, a poisonous book, that it's a disgrace to have written it,” Mr Barry said at today's book launch. “That's a total beat-up."2009, Natasha Robinson, 'James Packer book outrage a beat-up, says Paul Barry', The Australian, Business section
    • Few areas of science journalism are more susceptible to frothy beat-ups than stem cell research.2009, Michael Cook, 'Is Britain’s stem cell crisis a beat-up?', BioEdge

Forms of beat-up

Adjective
comparativemore beat-up
superlativemost beat-up
Noun
pluralbeat-ups

Origin of beat-up

Deverbal from beat up.

Questions about beat-up

What does beat-up mean?
Beat-up means worn out by overuse; in a state of disrepair.
What part of speech is beat-up?
Beat-up can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near beat-up in the dictionary

  1. beat-mixed
  2. beat-mixes
  3. beat-mixing
  4. beat-script
  5. beat-scripts
  6. beat-up
  7. beat-ups
  8. beatability
  9. beatable
  10. beatbox
  11. beatboxed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beat-up (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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Cite this entry: “beat-up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/beat-up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.