beak off

English

Etymology

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

Verb

beak off (third-person singular simple present beaks off, present participle beaking off, simple past and past participle beaked off) (slang)

To complain.
- 2005, Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road, page 87:
  Stop beaking off at everyone all the —
  The first pitch blows right by.
- 2016, Jean Oram, Tequila and Candy Drops:
  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.
- 2018, Fran Kimmel, No Good Asking:
  His dad told him to quit beaking off. We're doing this for your mom, okay. It's Christmas.
To boast.
- 1997, Ronald Mark Chambers, Three Really Nasty Plays, page 172:
  All you do is sit around, scratch your balls, rub your lucky tummy and beak off about how much money you're making!
- 2009, Stephen Schneider, Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada, page 178:
  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.
- 2011, John Conrad, Scarce Heard Amid the Guns: An Inside Look at Canadian Peacekeeping, page 156:
  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].
- 2019, A. F. Henley, The Chase and the Catch:
  Beaking off about how you'd never get John to crack... what the fuck does he know, right?
To yammer; to blab.
- 2019, R.W. Laidlaw, Oasis, page 234:
  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, A.F. Henley, Road Trip:
  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.
- 2021, Susan Hayes, Mating Fever:
  The cook had used too much of his own product and started beaking off to the wrong people.
To be truant; to skip school.
- 1996, John Sugden, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis, page 102:
  Most attend school reluctantly and some 'beak off' (play truant) regularly.
- 1998, Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle, page 49:
  I beaked off school on the afternoon of one of the most important Orange marches of the year.
- 2013, Neil Mackay, All the Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang:
  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.

Anagrams

bakeoff, bake-off