beat up
"beat-up" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“beat up” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 7
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To give a severe beating to; to assault violently with repeated blows.
Corpus desk
Index EN-beat-up · beat up · English
beat up · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 7 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "B" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | beat up |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “beat up” in English
Rare enough to double-check
beat up is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 11 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for beat up, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our dataset records no confusable match here, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is beat up, spelled B-E-A-T- -U-P.
Definition
- 1To give a severe beating to; to assault violently with repeated blows.
- 2To wake up earlier than.
- 3To attack suddenly; to alarm.
- 4To cause, by some other means, injuries comparable to the result of being beaten up.
- 5To feel badly guilty and accuse (oneself) over something. (Usually followed by over or about.)
- 6To make (someone) feel badly guilty and accuse (them) over something.
- 7To repeatedly bomb a military target or targets.
- 8To get something done (derived from the idea of beating for game).
- 9To sail to windward using a series of alternate tacks across the wind.
- 10To disturb; to pay an untimely visit to.
- 11To go diligently about in order to get helpers or participants in an enterprise.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how beat up appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I got beaten up by thugs on my way home.
You don't beat people up, so that you can live in a society where nobody would beat you up.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.