Dictionary

beak off en · VERB

Etymology

* (complain; boast; yammer): Using beak as slang for a person's mouth.

Meanings

1. (slang) To complain.
   • His dad told him to quit beaking off. We're doing this for your mom, okay. It's Christmas. 2018, Fran Kimmel, No Good Asking:
   • She'd been an absolute bear all day yesterday--to the point where Devon had shoved her off her zip-line platform when she'd started beaking off at him for not pointing out the moose he'd seen in the first section. 2016, Jean Oram, Tequila and Candy Drops:
   • Stop beaking off at everyone all the — The first pitch blows right by. 2005, Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road, page 87:
2. (slang) To boast.
   • Beaking off about how you'd never get John to crack... what the fuck does he know, right? 2019, A. F. Henley, The Chase and the Catch:
   • During a ballyhooed interview with the Toronto Daily Star, Rocco beaked off that he sometimes sold as many as one thousand cases of whiskey a day. 2009, Stephen Schneider, Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada, page 178:
   • When I got to them they said there was a couple of drunk Cambodian soldiers along the outside of the wire firing into the air. When I looked around the corner, I could see them drinking and beaking off [boasting]. 2011, John Conrad, Scarce Heard Amid the Guns: An Inside Look at Canadian Peacekeeping, page 156:
   • All you do is sit around, scratch your balls, rub your lucky tummy and beak off about how much money you're making! 1997, Ronald Mark Chambers, Three Really Nasty Plays, page 172:
3. (slang) To yammer; to blab.
   • The cook had used too much of his own product and started beaking off to the wrong people. 2021, Susan Hayes, Mating Fever:
   • No one seemed to care that a lowly trooper was beaking off during an officers' meeting: in fact, clearly everyone had been listening to him, not the other way around. 2019, R.W. Laidlaw, Oasis, page 234:
   • Nobody should have known it was there, but someone obviously did. Frank or Mitch probably beaked off to the wrong person and they came sniffing around. 2019, A.F. Henley, Road Trip:
4. (slang) To be truant; to skip school.
   • Most attend school reluctantly and some 'beak off' (play truant) regularly. 1996, John Sugden, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis, page 102:
   • I beaked off school on the afternoon of one of the most important Orange marches of the year. 1998, Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle, page 49:
   • Roger the Dodger is always pulling a swifty and beaking off school – covering his face in his mammy's compact powder to make himself look all ill and deathly pale; using her lippy to put red dots on himself like he's got the measles. 2013, Neil Mackay, All the Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang:

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