Question: > 
> “Imagine trying to **bleep** open your car one day,” says Graham Steel,
>  the boss of Cryptosense, a firm that makes automated security-checking
>  software, “but then you’re told that your car has been locked, and if
>  you want back in you need to send $200 to some shady Russian e-mail
>  address.”
> 
> 
> 

This sentence is extracted from *The economist*. I looked up the dictionary and found that "bleep" can be used as noun or verb. In this sentence, I think "open" is the verb, then "bleep" should be an adverb to modify "open". But there is not such usage in dictionary. Does "bleep" make sense if it is a noun or a verb in this sentence? and how? 

The whole paragrah is:

> 
> A recent development is “ransomware”, in which malicious programs
>  encrypt documents and photographs, and a victim must pay to have them
>  restored. “Imagine trying to bleep open your car one day,” says Graham
>  Steel, the boss of Cryptosense, a firm that makes automated
>  security-checking software, “but then you’re told that your car has
>  been locked, and if you want back in you need to send $200 to some
>  shady Russian e-mail address.”
> 
> 
>

Answer: 
It's **not** a compound verb as others are writing. Compare *sugarcoat* vs. *bleep open* in the following sentences:

> 
> 1a. I tried to bleep open my car.
> 
> 
> 1b. I tried to bleep my car open.
> 
> 
> 2a. I tried to sugarcoat the scenario.
> 
> 
> 2b. \*I tried to coat the scenario sugar.
> 
> 
> 

(1b) is perfectly valid, separating the **verb** *bleep* from the **[object complement](http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/object_complement.htm) adjective** *open*. Doing the same in (2b), with compound verbs like *sugarcoat*, this is clearly ungrammatical. If *bleep open* were indeed a compound verb, it would behave as a single verb -- an inseparable unit like *sugarcoat* or *tap dance* -- but it does not.

The sentence structure used in the article is the same as in "I tried to force open my car". Again, *force* is the transitive verb and *open* is an object complement.

So what kind of a verb is *bleep*? It's an [onomatopoeia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia) used as a transitive verb. This happens now and then in informal, spoken language. Here's a less grammatically confusing example from Merriam-Webster:

> 
> [[She] keeps *dinging* it into him that the less he smokes the better.](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ding)
> 
> 
> 

You could also say something like this:

> 
> He told me my [air horn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_horn) was getting annoying, so I *honked* him away.
> 
> 
> 

Here, that means: I drove him away using some tool (the air horn) that makes a honking sound. Similarly, *bleep* is used in the same sense; the tool being used (the keypad on a remote keyless system) makes a *blip!* sound when you open your car with it.
In this case *bleep open* acts like a compound verb, such as the verb *[finger paint](http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/finger%20paint)*.

A compound verb is when a noun is "added" to a verb, so that it becomes part of the verb. Other examples are *sugar coat* and *tap dance*. Many times a hyphen is used when spelling these words: this is to show that the noun/verb compound is being used as **one (compound) word**. And then if they get used a lot they can be spelled with no hyphen or space (*[breastfeed](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/breastfeed)*). 

So the author could have written *bleep-open*. But it is probably a fairly recent combination, without a lot of usage, and so people don't consider it a true compound word yet.