Definition of BE (original) (raw)

or less commonly bes or be's —used in the uninflected form be or sometimes the form bes or be's in [African American English](/dictionary/African American English) and to varying degrees in some other varieties of English to indicate that an action or state is habitual or frequent

I be singing in the shower.

… they be bothering you while you try and do your work. …—unidentified African American English speaker, quoted in The Corpus of Regional African American Language

It bes that way.

We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with "That's not unusual." But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said "It be's like that sometimes."—Maya Angelou

Note: This feature of African American English often occurs between the subject and predicate of a sentence, and can precede noun phrases, prepositional phrases, adverbial phrases, adjectives, passive verbs, -ing verbs, and the African American English feature perfective done. In linguistics, this use is referred to as [aspectual be](/dictionary/aspectual be), [habitual be](/dictionary/habitual be), or [invariant be](/dictionary/invariant be). It usually occurs in the uninflected form be, as in the first two examples above; however, in African American English in particular, it sometimes takes the form bes or be's.