beingnoun [ C or U ]
uk/ˈbiː.ɪŋ/us/ˈbiː.ɪŋ/C2 a person or thing that exists:
A nuclear war would kill millions of living beings.
Strange beings from outer space are still a popular subject for sci-fi movies.
the state of existing:
We do not know exactly how life first came into being (= began to exist.)
More examples
- Some fans seem to regard footballers as divine beings.
- The United States is in the van of the quest to establish contact with beings from the beyond.
- There was a man on the news last night who reckons we've been visited by beings from other worlds.
- All living creatures are thought to descend from an organism that came into being three billion years ago.
- Dinosaurs pre-existed human beings by many millions of years.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Existing and being
- account for sth
- alive
- am
- are
- be
- come
- extant
- go
- go back
- have legs idiom
- hood
- languish
- leg
- lie
- lie in sth
- live
- lurk
- obtain
- run
- stalk
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