Word.ws English Dictionary

beat back

beat back verb: to fight against and cause to recede.

Verb

beat back (third-person singular simple present beats back, present participle beating back, simple past beat back, past participle beaten back or beat back)

  1. (transitive) To fight against and cause to recede.
    • I couldn't expect people to understand how much their voices actually meant to me—how they had sustained my spirits and beat back whispering doubts on those late, solitary nights.2020, Barack Obama, chapter 13, in A Promised Land, Crown
    • But the Republican blockade in the Senate left Democrats without a clear path forward, and without a means to beat back the restrictive voting laws racing through Republican-led states.2021 June 22, Nicholas Fandos, “Republicans Block Voting Rights Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden and Democrats”, in The New York Times

Forms of beat back

third-person singular presentbeats back
present participlebeating back
pastbeat back
past participlebeaten back
past participlebeat back

Questions about beat back

What does beat back mean?
Beat back means to fight against and cause to recede.
What part of speech is beat back?
Beat back is a verb.
What is the past tense of beat back?
The past tense of beat back is beat back.

Words near beat back in the dictionary

  1. beat about
  2. beat about the bush
  3. beat all
  4. beat around the bush
  5. beat as one
  6. beat back
  7. beat Banaghan
  8. beat boxing
  9. beat cop
  10. beat cops
  11. beat down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beat back (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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