# Source: https://beartype.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/decorators/

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# Beartype API: It Bears Bookmarking[¶](#beartype-api-it-bears-bookmarking)

Beartype isn’t just the [`beartype.beartype()`](../api_decor/#beartype.beartype) decorator.

Beartype is a menagerie of public APIs for type-checking, introspecting, and
manipulating type hints at runtime – all accessible under the `beartype`
package installed when you installed beartype. But all beartype documentation
begins with [`beartype.beartype()`](../api_decor/#beartype.beartype), just like all rivers run to the sea.
[[1]](#endorheic-basins)

[[1](#id1)]
That’s a lie, actually. Numerous river tributaries just pour out into
deserts. Do [endorheic basins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin) mean nothing to you, beartype? Wikipedia:
*the more you click, the less you know.*

**Bear with Us**

- [The Left-Paw Path](#the-left-paw-path)

## [The Left-Paw Path](#id7)[¶](#the-left-paw-path)

See the left sidebar for links to human-readable API documentation – including:

- [`beartype`](../api_decor/#module-beartype), documenting the core [`beartype()`](../api_decor/#beartype.beartype) decorator API.

- [`beartype.claw`](../api_claw/#module-beartype.claw), documenting the beartype import hook API.

[`beartype.door`](../api_door/#module-beartype.door), documenting the Decidedly Object-Oriented
Runtime-checker (DOOR) API.
- [`beartype.roar`](../api_roar/#module-beartype.roar), documenting the beartype exception and warning API.

- [`beartype.vale`](../api_vale/#module-beartype.vale), documenting the beartype validator API.

Or see these autogenerated indices for machine-readable laundry lists. For those
about to put on the 90’s-era Geocities nostalgia goggles, you prefer inscrutable
enumerations in lexicographic (i.e., effectively arbitrary) order of *all*
public beartype:

[Attributes](../genindex/). This is literally everything. By everything, we
mean modules, classes, functions, and globals. If it’s not here, it doesn’t
exist. If it actually exists, it’s private and you shouldn’t have gone there.
But curiosity killed your codebase, didn’t it? You went there. You violated
privacy encapsulation and now nothing works. So this is what it’s like when
doves cry.
- [Modules](../py-modindex/). Look. It’s just modules. Never click this.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Explain Like I’m Five (ELI5)

 
 
 
 
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 Beartype Import Hooks

 
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