Meaning
To have a complaint, grievance, or running quarrel with a person or group; the noun 'beef' covers everything from a single grumble to a lasting feud, and the phrase usually implies the grievance is being nursed or aired rather than resolved. Informal in register. Informal; spans mild grousing to serious feuding, with a modern tilt toward public rivalries. Regional use: General English (American origin).
Origin
Documented as American slang of the late 19th century: Etymonline dates the noun 'beef' meaning a complaint to the 1880s, the verb 'to complain' to 1888, and the 'argument' sense to the 1930s; Grammarphobia cites the OED's earliest verb example (The New York World, May 13, 1888) and earliest noun example (George Ade's Fables in Slang, 1900). The deeper roots lie in older English criminal cant: to 'cry beef' meant to raise an alarm, recorded in A New Canting Dictionary (1725), and Vaux's 1812 flash dictionary defines beefing as shouting 'stop thief' after someone; a London court case of 1832 spread 'hot beef' as rhyming slang for 'stop thief'. How the alarm-cry tradition turned into the American complaint sense is likely but not fully charted: World Wide Words places the complaint verb as early as the 1860s, while Etymonline calls the signification unclear and mentions soldiers' complaints about beef rations as one possibility. The 1725-1888 chain is documented; the semantic bridge is inference.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- beef with someone
- have no beef with someone
- hold a beef against someone
- what's the beef?
Usage Examples
- I don't have a beef with the neighbors personally; I just want the music off by midnight.
- Ever since the committee rejected his proposal, he has had a beef with its chairman.
- The two departments have a long-running beef over who controls the training budget.