“Beauty and the Beast”

Cultural  

1. A French fairy tale about a beautiful and gentle young woman who is taken to live with a man-beast in return for a good deed the Beast did for her father. Beauty is kind to the well-mannered Beast but pines for her family until the Beast allows her to visit them. Once home, Beauty delays her return until she hears that the Beast is dying without her. She returns to the Beast and brings him back to health. When she agrees to marry him, the evil spell upon him is broken, and he becomes a handsome prince. Beauty and her prince live happily ever after.

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Example Sentences

With Zephyr’s tough-girl demeanor and Tucker’s creepy vibe, Byrne knowingly plays into genre clichés, setting up the inevitable showdown between the beauty and the beast.

From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 6, 2025

Fay Wray and King Kong perform as modern Surrealist fantasies of hoary beauty and the beast.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 20, 2019

Denham’s insistence that this is a story of beauty and the beast here gets presented as a cynical showman’s hokum rather than some fairy-tale insight.

From Slate • Nov. 8, 2018

It’s her modern-day take on what exactly femininity entails: the beauty and the beast.

From Washington Post • Feb. 26, 2015

The camel bowed very low and some one made the obvious remark about beauty and the beast.

From Tales of the Jazz Age by Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott)