Beaten

How to spell beaten

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce beaten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does beaten mean?

1. verbPast participle of beat: hit repeatedly, or stirred and whisked vigorously.
2. adjectiveDefeated, worn down, or exhausted by a contest or hardship.
3. adjectiveMade firm or worn by repeated treading, as a path or track.

Beaten in a sentence

• verb

  The eggs must be beaten until they turn pale and frothy.

• adjective

  The home team looked beaten long before the final whistle.

• adjective

  The hikers stuck to the beaten track to avoid getting lost.

• verb

  The old rug looked as if it had been beaten to remove the dust.

• adjective

  She arrived home tired and beaten after the long legal battle.

• adjective

  Their cabin sits well off the beaten path, miles from any road.

Where does beaten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb beat, which descends directly from the Old English verb beatan, meaning 'to strike, to thrash, or to pound'. That word was thoroughly native to Anglo-Saxon English and had close cousins across the older Germanic languages, including Old Norse bauta, all carrying the sense of hitting something hard and repeatedly. The form 'beaten', with its old strong-verb ending in -en, has been used since the medieval period and survives where many similar -en participles have faded. Over the centuries the word branched into rich figurative uses: a defeated opponent is 'beaten', a well-worn track is the 'beaten path', and eggs whisked vigorously are 'beaten'. The spelling trap is mostly the unstressed ending, which sounds like a flat 'un' yet is written -en, the same ending preserved in eaten and broken.

How the word is built

• beat (from Old English beatan: to strike)
• -en (past participle suffix)