Beast

How to spell beast

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beast

What does beast mean?

1. nounA wild or large animal, especially one regarded as dangerous or untamed.
2. nounInformally, a person or thing of remarkable power, size, or difficulty.

Beast in a sentence

• The farmer kept the injured beast in a separate pen.

• The new engine is an absolute beast on the motorway.

• Explorers wrote about every strange beast they found in the jungle.

• That final exam was a real beast to get through.

Where does beast come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin bestia, which simply meant an animal or a brute creature, as opposed to a human being. It travelled into English through Old French, where it took the form beste, and was adopted around the early 1200s. For a long stretch of the Middle Ages 'beast' was the ordinary everyday word for any four-footed animal, and only later did 'animal' (itself a Latin borrowing) crowd it into the more colourful senses of a wild, dangerous, or savage creature. The same Latin bestia also gives us 'bestial' and the gathering of animal stories known as the 'bestiary'. The spelling keeps the French-influenced 'ea' vowel, which sounds like a long 'ee' and is the small trap for writers who might expect 'ee'.

How the word is built

• beast (from Latin bestia: animal, brute), an unanalysable root in modern English