Cut

How to spell cut

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cut

What does cut mean?

1. verbTo divide, pierce, or remove something using a sharp edge or blade.
2. nounA reduction in amount, size, or level, especially of money or staffing.
3. nounA wound or opening made in the skin by something sharp.

Cut in a sentence

• verb

  Please cut the bread into thin slices for the sandwiches.

• noun

  The council announced a steep cut to the road maintenance budget.

• noun

  She cleaned the small cut on her finger before applying a plaster.

• verb

  A sharp scalpel can cut through tissue with very little pressure.

• noun

  Workers protested against the proposed cut in their hourly pay.

• noun

  The deep cut on his knee needed several stitches at the clinic.

Where does cut come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Cut is one of those plain, hard-working English verbs whose recorded history is surprisingly short. It first appears in Middle English around the 1200s as cutten or kytten, meaning to divide or sever with a sharp edge. Before that the trail goes cold: there is no clear Old English ancestor, and scholars suspect a borrowing from a Scandinavian source, comparing the Old Norse kuti, meaning a small knife, and the related kytta, to cut. Over the centuries the single short word fanned out into dozens of senses, from slicing bread to reducing a budget to staying away from a class, yet the spelling never grew more complicated than its three blunt letters. That very plainness is the only trap: the final consonant doubles before a vowel ending (cutting, cutter) even though the bare word stays simply c-u-t.

How the word is built

• cut (single Middle English root; no prefix or suffix, the past tense and past participle are unchanged)