noun
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a lover, sweetheart, or escort of a girl or woman
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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:
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
Of course, Swift and her beau announced Tuesday, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 27, 2025
Swift was in the audience Thursday night in Sunrise, alongside beau Travis Kelce as the local Panthers rushed out to a 3-0 lead, one game after thumping the Oilers 6-1.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 13, 2025
Aunt Margaret had a new beau and I suspected that she wasn’t giving my eighth-grade problems enough serious thought, but one day she did ask me if I knew the Pledge of Allegiance.
From "Homesick" by Jean Fritz
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
Shortly afterward, the two were out and about on a double date with their beaus.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 6, 2023
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
Both beaus met Young's parents – though Young's family wasn't particularly fond of Jones, Us Weekly reports.
From Fox News ● Dec. 22, 2021
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
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
Or was she, as I’d rather think, cutting up her cardboard beaux in her mind even as she created them, and laughing at her public as much as at her characters?
From The Guardian ● Jul. 15, 2017
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
Her beaux turned to me for consolation, and I gave them the same advice I have for you: Think no more of the minks, because she has already forgotten you.
From "Ella Enchanted" by Gail Carson Levine
Definitions 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.
