Word.ws English Dictionary

beaver away

beaver away verb: to work hard at a task.

Verb

beaver away (third-person singular simple present beavers away, present participle beavering away, simple past and past participle beavered away)

  1. (idiomatic) To work hard at a task.
    • She won't be going out much, as she's beavering away on her thesis.
    • The most obvious impact of the strike was the “havoc” created at Glasgow and London’s Heathrow airports by striking air traffic controllers (who joined the strike in solidarity and are not themselves directly involved in the dispute). But quietly and without fuss, thousands of scientists normally...1979 June 28, “Feedback: Trouble at th’ Laboratory”, in New Scientist, page 1103

Forms of beaver away

third-person singular presentbeavers away
present participlebeavering away
past participlebeavered away
pastbeavered away

Origin of beaver away

From the metaphorical image of a person working as industriously as a beaver building its dam.

Questions about beaver away

What does beaver away mean?
Beaver away means to work hard at a task.
What part of speech is beaver away?
Beaver away is a verb.
What is the past tense of beaver away?
The past tense of beaver away is beavered away.

Words near beaver away in the dictionary

  1. Beavan
  2. beave
  3. Beaven
  4. Beavens
  5. beaver
  6. beaver away
  7. Beaver City
  8. Beaver County
  9. Beaver Creek
  10. beaver dam
  11. beaver dams

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beaver away (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-beaver away.ogg.

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