Meaning
Said of something so extraordinary, vast or extreme that language fails it: the thing surpasses or exhausts the resources of description. Normally with a dummy or inanimate subject and the verb in the singular - it beggars description. The image is of words being reduced to beggary, left utterly impoverished, by whatever is being described. Almost always third-person singular with a dummy subject ('it beggars description'). The sibling idiom beggar belief is now the more common form; Merriam-Webster labels that one chiefly British. Avoid 'beggars description' with a plural subject unless you mean that people are beggars. Regional use: UK and US; literary register throughout English.
Origin
From Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 2, where Enobarbus describes Cleopatra on her barge: 'For her own person, / It beggar'd all description' - verified verbatim against shakespeare.mit.edu (the 1623 Folio spelling runs 'It beggerd all discription'). The verb itself is older and literal: the OED records the verb beggar from 1528, earliest in the writing of William Roy, in the sense of reducing someone to beggary. Word Histories, which surveyed the early uses, finds no figurative use earlier than this passage, so 'beggared all description' - written around 1606 and first printed in the 1623 Folio - stands as the earliest known appearance of the construction; Shakespeare apparently first used the verb figuratively. The pattern then spread to other objects: Word Histories traces beggar belief to a pamphlet of 25 January 1780 (Thoughts on News-papers and a Free Trade), beggar compare to 1815, and beggar one's feelings to 1825. Here the Shakespeare-origin claim holds up better than usual.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- beggar all description
- beggar belief
- beggar description
Usage Examples
- The scale of the flooding beggars description; whole villages were under water within hours.
- Her wardrobe beggars description - neon, tartan, and a rubber raincoat worn as a cape.
- The mess the departing tenants left behind beggars description, according to the landlord.