beat the pants off

English

Alternative forms

• lick the pants off
• whip the pants off

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

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Verb

beat the pants off (third-person singular simple present beats the pants off, present participle beating the pants off, simple past beat the pants off, past participle beaten the pants off or beat the pants off)

1. (transitive, idiomatic) To thoroughly and decisively defeat someone, either in a physical fight or, figuratively, in a competition.
   • 1987 September 6, Bernard Weinraub, “Reagan Tells Congress to Shun Protectionism”, in New York Times, retrieved 16 August 2012:

     American workers can outcompete and beat the pants off anybody, anywhere.

   • 1996 June 3, John Greenwald et al., “Magellan's New Direction”, in Time:

     Jeffrey Vinik, manager of the $56 billion Fidelity Magellan Fund, the world's largest and most closely watched mutual fund, "beat the pants off the managers of other large funds," in the words of one analyst.

   • 2001 June 24, Janice Castro, “Business”, in Time:

     Their counterparts in Canada, Europe and Japan made less than half as much, sometimes while beating the pants off them in the marketplace.

Synonyms

• See Thesaurus:clobber

References

• “beat the pants off”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.