Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A full-grown steer, bull, ox, or cow, especially one intended for use as meat.
- n. The flesh of a slaughtered full-grown steer, bull, ox, or cow.
- n. Informal Human muscle; brawn.
- n. Slang A complaint.
- v. Slang To complain.
- beef up Informal To make or become greater or stronger: beef up the defense budget.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. An animal of the bovine genus, whether ox, bull, or cow, in the full-grown state.
- n. The flesh of an ox, bull, or cow when killed.
- n. A name given by quarrymen to certain beds of fibrous carbonate of lime occurring in England in the middle division of the Purbeck series, the highest part of the Jurassic.
- n. Brawn; muscularity; weight and strength combined: as, the crew is lacking in beef.
Wiktionary
- n. The meat from a cow, bull or other bovines.
- n. Bovine animals.
- n. A single bovine (cow or bull) being raised for its meat.
- n. a complaint or disagreement
- v. To complain.
- v. To add weight or strength to, usually as beef up.
- v. To fart.
- adj. Being a bovine animal that is being raised for its meat.
- adj. Producing or known for raising lots of beef.
- adj. Consisting of or containing beef as an ingredient.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. An animal of the genus Bos, especially the common species, Bos taurus, including the bull, cow, and ox, in their full grown state; esp., an ox or cow fattened for food.
- n. The flesh of an ox, or cow, or of any adult bovine animal, when slaughtered for food.
- n. Applied colloquially to human flesh.
- adj. Of, pertaining to, or resembling, beef.
WordNet 3.0
- v. complain.
- n. meat from an adult domestic bovine
- n. informal terms for objecting
- n. cattle that are reared for their meat
Etymologies
- Middle English, from Old French buef, from Latin bōs, bov-; see gwou- in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“So the energy in beef is much, much higher than the other foods.”
“My main beef is that over the last 20 years there has been no real discussion of police tactics and what is felt to be acceptable to the community.”
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“And even if the Feinstein beef is squashed, Panetta looked forward to "consulting closely with my former partners in Congress.”
“Losing the flavor of corn in beef is like scraping away a gooey glaze.”
“Fuzzywantstoswallow your beef is the most ignorant and pathetic human being the world has ever seen.”
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“In Peru, sopa criolla “Creole soup” is what they call beef soup.”
“Once we had animals, great and small, and all the blessings of Nature; we had horses and, I think, what you call beef; a thousand other creatures that were food and help and companions to man.”
“Wall they had a lot of furrin dishes, sumthin what they called beef all over mud, and another what they called a-charlotte russia-a little shavin 'mug made out of cake and full of sweetened lather, wall that was mighty good eatin', though it took a lot of them, they wasn't very fillin '.”
“The station bleeped out the word "beef," a show of sensitivity for Hindus' reverence for cows, leaving viewers to guess why her diners were so disgusted.”
“-- "The yokes! by the powers, is that what they call beef in Canady?”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘beef’.
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Old Western Slang
a hog-killin' time, a lick and a promise, according to Hoyle, ace-high, all down but nine, arbuckle's, at sea, back down, balled up, bang-up, bazoo, bear sign and 210 more...
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Noteworthy Words
Here I have in mind a list of words that could be spelled with only the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, and G--and thus could also be played as a tune on the piano.
face, ace, bag, cage, bad, fad, fade, fee, gee, beg, fed, deaf and 98 more...
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Cattle
cattle, cow, beef, steer, heifer, calf, bull, cattle call, Black Angus, Hereford, Holstein, Dwarf Lulu and 376 more...
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The Pain of Texting
Words that are a pain in the ass to type in on a numerical keypad on a cell phone because they have consecutive letters that share the same button:
2 - ABC
3 - DEF
4 - GHI...defcon, hi, no, attitude, xylophone, on, monday, monkey, mono, dig, back, babble and 212 more...
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These Verbs Are Made of Meat
baconize, baconise, meatpacking, permeate, hambone hambone h..., spam, fillet, shank, mince, beef, chine, flank and 28 more...
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feed me
fodder
tripe, trotter, belly, beef, oyster, ei, beanz, ale, bier, jerez, crunch, saliva and 8 more...

chained_bear Taken at Yorktown, "900 barrels of beef and pork." A week or two later, the report added an additional "96 barrels beef, (weight) 20,190 lb." Oct 29, 2007