beaters

Noun

beater (plural beaters)

1. Someone or something that beats.
   • His batwings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken floundering things they were than if they had been strong, muscular beaters of the air.1982, Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, page 94
2. A kitchen implement for mixing.
3. An implement used to strike certain percussion instruments.
4. A person who drives game towards shooters in a hunting party, typically working in a group with other beaters.
   • The beaters halted in a group to watch, and some of them could not refrain from clicking their tongues; they thought it queer and rather shocking to see a woman handle a gun.1934, George Orwell, chapter 14, in Burmese Days
5. A papermaking machine for processing fibres by fibrillation in order to improve bonding strength
6. (US, informal) An old or dilapidated automobile.
   • Packed merrily into my friends’ beater, an old Ford Pinto, we headed into Jennings, a mostly Black North St. Louis County community heavily patrolled by white officers, to pick up one more college friend.2020 July 14, Ron Stodghill, “Black Behind the Wheel”, in New York Times

   Synonyms:

   banger, bucket, hooptie, jalopy, wreck, crock, shitbox, rustbucket, bucket of bolts, bucket of rust

See all 12 meanings of beater