Word.ws English Dictionary

beat the bushes

beat the bushes verb: synonym of pound the pavement (“to campaign diligently; to seek something”).

beat the bushes: synonym of pound the pavement (“to campaign diligently; to seek something”)
Image: Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

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

  1. (Canada, US, idiomatic) Synonym of pound the pavement (“to campaign diligently; to seek something”).
    • They started beating the bushes in search of a commercially available solvent that would aid their manufacturing but wouldn't be too horribly toxic and wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

beat the bushes meaning in Tamil

beat the bushes in Tamil

முடிந்தவரை

Synonyms of beat the bushes

Forms of beat the bushes

third-person singular presentbeats the bushes
present participlebeating the bushes
pastbeat the bushes
past participlebeaten the bushes
past participle (colloquial)beat the bushes

Origin of beat the bushes

Both beat the bushes and scare up have figurative senses, referring to traversing the landscape seeking difficult-to-find things, that arose by extension from their senses referring to driving game out of the bush when hunting.

Questions about beat the bushes

What does beat the bushes mean?
Beat the bushes means synonym of pound the pavement (“to campaign diligently; to seek something”).
What is beat the bushes in Tamil?
Beat the bushes in Tamil is முடிந்தவரை. See Beat the bushes meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is beat the bushes?
Beat the bushes is a verb.
What is the past tense of beat the bushes?
The past tense of beat the bushes is beat the bushes.

Words near beat the bushes in the dictionary

  1. beat the air
  2. beat the allegations
  3. beat the bat
  4. beat the bishop
  5. beat the bounds
  6. beat the bushes
  7. beat the clock
  8. beat the cock
  9. beat the crap out of
  10. beat the crowd
  11. beat the daylight out of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beat the bushes (page history and authors); beat the bushes (Tamil Wiktionary) (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 the bushes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/beat_the_bushes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.