Cutter

How to spell cutter

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cutter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cutter mean?

1. nounA tool, machine, or person that cuts something.
2. nounA small, fast single-masted sailing boat, or a similar patrol vessel used by a coast guard.

Cutter in a sentence

• The chef reached for a pizza cutter to slice the pie evenly.

• The coast guard cutter raced out to the stranded fishing boat.

• A cigar cutter sat beside the humidor on his desk.

• A small wooden cutter was moored beside the larger yachts in the harbour.

Where does cutter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is an English formation built on the verb 'cut' plus the agent suffix '-er', which turns a verb into a word for the person or tool that performs the action. The verb 'cut' itself is something of a mystery: it appears in English from around the 1200s with no clear ancestor in Old English, and scholars suspect a North Germanic or Scandinavian source, perhaps related to Old Norse words for paring or whittling. The '-er' ending is a very old and productive Germanic suffix, the same one seen in 'baker' and 'driver', and it lets English coin a name for almost any doer or device at will. By the 1400s 'cutter' described a person who cuts, and the meaning soon stretched to cover sharp tools and, intriguingly, fast small ships, since such vessels seemed to 'cut' swiftly through the water. The doubled 't' is the spelling trap here: it survives because the short vowel in 'cut' must be protected when '-er' is added, a regular English rule that still catches writers off guard.

How the word is built

• cut (to sever)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: one that does, or a tool that does)