noun
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a lover, sweetheart, or escort of a girl or woman
-
a man who is greatly concerned with his clothes and appearance; dandy
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of beau
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English, from French, from Latin bellus “beautiful”
Explanation
A beau is an old-fashioned term for "boyfriend." When your great-grandmother was young, she probably had a beau. Beau means "handsome" in French. Pronounce it the same way the French do, with a long o: "boh." The word recalls more innocent times, when gentleman courted their ladies and skirts barely rose above ankle level. You'll hardly ever hear beau used today, unless you're watching a movie, play or television drama set in the past.
Vocabulary lists containing beau
Scrabble: Four-Letter Words with 3 Vowels
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The Glass Menagerie
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The Haunting of Hill House
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Timby extended her time in Ireland and documented much of it for her newfound following - but she didn't reveal anything about her new beau.
From BBC ● Sep. 18, 2026
Afterward the beau monde had a few days to find new costumes for the Monday Mayday masquerade.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 2026
Will’s beau idéal, Ronald Reagan, used it frequently on the rubber-chicken-and-peas circuit.
From Salon ● Dec. 20, 2025
Octavia, in which a gushing party girl falls instantly in love with a blond, sharp-cheeked beau called Jeremy, later became an ITV series.
From BBC ● Oct. 6, 2025
Four o’clock came and went, and neither Nicole nor the beau or whoever he was showed up.
From "Burning Blue" by Paul Griffin
This is a huge limitation, as Flock has been used by officers to track not just exes but the new beaus with whom they have moved on.
From Salon ● Aug. 17, 2026
As fate would have it, all that time spent researching how bats find their beaus may have led to another pairing.
From National Geographic ● Feb. 14, 2024
The director Sara Gunnarsdottir ruthlessly illustrates the gulf between the high schooler’s florid romanticism and her beaus, who are, mostly, a parade of creeps.
From New York Times ● Feb. 16, 2023
A young woman hopes to uncover which of her mother’s former beaus is her father in this romantic musical built around the songs of the Swedish pop group ABBA.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2019
I hadn’t seen a picture of her since she’d been in high school and now she was twenty-one and taught music and had lots of beaus.
From "Homesick" by Jean Fritz
What strikes you first are his scenes’ forthright emotions—a group of women tearfully sending their beaux off to fight in World War II, the isolation of a young man dining alone at a cafeteria.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 25, 2026
Over the years, Swift has been mocked for the often autobiographical nature of her songs — when not alluding to bad behavior by old beaux, she often pushed back against critics and producers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 12, 2023
The entire family showed up, including Kylie Jenner in a white ballgown with a matching hat and big sister Kourtney Kardashian in deconstructed Thom Browne to go with beaux Travis Barker’s Thom Browne suit.
From Washington Times ● May 3, 2022
The book, as it stands, feels ominously loveless, more hospitable to dolts than to eligible beaux, yet at least seven writers have sought to flesh it out and, in so doing, to warm it up.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 5, 2017
Darlene cleared her throat and enunciated carefully, “There sure was plenty beaux at the bowl, honey, but I still got me honor.”
From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
