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:
Separately, UK actor Hannah Waddingham is depicted next to her "NHS surgeon beau", who the paper says has got a "Hollywood makeover".
From BBC ● Jul. 29, 2026
Old enough to know that John Donaldson, her beau of more than a decade, was the man she wanted to marry.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 22, 2026
When I ask for his American political beau ideal, he says Alexander Hamilton.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 2, 2026
Will’s beau idéal, Ronald Reagan, used it frequently on the rubber-chicken-and-peas circuit.
From Salon ● Dec. 20, 2025
Miss Quentin and her beau in the swing yonder.
From "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner
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
Shortly afterward, the two were out and about on a double date with their beaus.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 6, 2023
To fight back, he started giving in-person architecture tours — in Kyiv and elsewhere — with hopes of convincing more people that his brutalist beaus are worth keeping.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 25, 2022
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
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
The “Follies” tale of two showgirls and their beaux bears the doom of the ancient Greek stage.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 9, 2016
“How does Washington come on? Many beaux? Many believers? Many friends? Answer these questions you wicked little Maggie.”
From "American Spirits" by Barb Rosenstock
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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.
