/ˈbiːt əˌɹaʊ̯nd ðə bʊʃ/
English idiom, informal. To avoid saying the important thing directly.
Draft Not yet checked by a native English speaker.
How do people use Beat around the bush
?
Informal and usually impatient: you say it to someone who’s taking too long to get to the point (“stop beating around the bush”), or to praise someone who doesn’t (“she didn’t beat around the bush”). “Around” is the American form and now the more common one in print; British speakers often say “beat about the bush”.
Also said beat about the bush
Beat around the bush
in real sentences
-
Stop beating around the bush.
Tatoeba, sentence by sacredceltic, CC BY 2.0 FR
-
Tom didn’t beat around the bush.
Tatoeba, sentence by CK, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does Beat around the bush
come from?
It comes from bird hunting, where beaters thrashed the bushes to flush birds out so others could net them: beating the bush was the warm-up, not the catch. Phrase Finder finds it in the anonymous poem Generydes (around 1440): “Some bete the bussh and some the byrdes take.” George Gascoigne added “about” in 1572, and according to Phrase Finder’s look at Google’s book data, “around” overtook “about” in print around 1980.
Mistakes learners make with Beat around the bush
Making the bush plural or dropping “around”. “Beat around the bushes” sounds wrong, and “beat the bushes” is a different idiom that means searching everywhere for something.
Other English idioms like Beat around the bush
Spot a mistake in Beat around the bush
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.