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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
beat-up
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a beat-up old Chevy
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He went to the window and watched the cars, beat-up minis and dusty sedans, entering and leaving the compound.
▪ I woke up after that first night in the bunk, and the first thing I saw was a beat-up car outside.
▪ She had large eyes, but mostly, it seemed, for his beat-up shoes.
▪ The desert town of Perfection, Nevada - all tumbleweed and beat-up trucks - gets attacked by giant earthworms.
▪ The person I had seen could have not the slightest interest in a beat-up old poet like me.
▪ The piano that we had inspected and paid for in the city was delivered by three young Arabs in a beat-up van.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
beat-up

beat-up \beat-up\ adj. same as beaten-up.

Syn: battered, beaten-up, bedraggled, broken-down, dilapidated, ramshackle, tumble-down, unsound.

Wiktionary
beat-up

a. (context chiefly of an object English) Worn out by overuse; in a state of disrepair n. (context Australia British New Zealand English) An artificially or disingenuously manufactured outcry, usually in the media.

WordNet
beat-up

adj. damaged by blows or hard usage; "a battered old car"; "the beaten-up old Ford" [syn: battered, beaten-up]

Usage examples of "beat-up".

Africa while, until just recently, Morant was still regularly spotted in his beat-up little airplane in the skies over Indonesia.

Carting the beat-up old briefcase, Paul Schumann was walking north through the Tiergarten.

He activated the visuals as they came through the airlock and saw that Hutch looked a little beat-up.

They all seemed even scruffier than usual, a worn-out, beat-up group of men.

Mal thought uncomfortably that she was overdressed in her cashmere, while Jordan looked scruffily at home in his faded jeans and the beat-up jacket.

She knew that there was a certain kind of person - a certain kind of man, to be specific - for whom the back of this limousine was like a natural habitat, who felt as comfortable sitting on those leather seats and drinking Chivas in the middle of the day as Mary Catherine felt behind the wheel of her beat-up old car.

At an intersection up ahead, a jalopy had broadsided an equally beat-up pickup and both were now burning.

But it stopped, backed up, and a young African man who looked to be in his early twenties, wearing a red, black, and green crocheted skullcap, dressed in a beat-up Army jacket, ragged yellow T-shirt, and dingy brown corduroy pants with black flip-flops on smiled and rolled down his window, hailing her.

Parked on East 114th, in a beat-up black Cadillac that Benton bought for $2,500 cash, is probably as close to Rao's as he will ever get again.

Everything Olive had carted into the catacombs was stashed neatly in a long line of open chests and crates, which also held sacks and backpacks, tents, blankets, saddlebags, chains, knives and whetstones, camp dishes, a beat-up shield, a Talis deck, dice, a backgammon board, mirrors, snares, nets, magnifying glasses, a few bottles of wine, and even lockpicks.

He was wearing a leather windbreaker and a heavy roll-collar blue sweater under it, a pair of beat-up Bedford cord breeches, and the kind of high laced boots that field engineers and surveyors wear in rough country.

He had on a navy blue blazer and khaki pants, and he was wearing loafers, not beat-up tennis shoes.

Worn-out shuttle main engines, too beat-up to be human-rated anymore, are being recycled: you can make a pretty useful throwaway booster out of a shuttle tailplane and a cargo pallet.

Three members of the Senile Brigade wearing beat-up old cowboy hats sat in the front seat, and another younger man neither Bloom nor Linda recognized squatted hi the back, smoking a cigarette.

Perry went out fishing in a simple rowboat and took the only bass lure he owned, a beat-up Creek Chub.