Cutting

How to spell cutting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cutting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cutting mean?

1. verbThe act of using a blade or tool to divide or trim something.
2. nounA piece taken from a plant and used to grow a new one.
3. nounAn article or item cut out of a newspaper or magazine.
4. adjectiveSharp and hurtful in tone or remark.

Cutting in a sentence

• verb

  He spent the afternoon cutting firewood for the winter.

• noun

  She rooted a cutting from the geranium in a glass of water.

• noun

  He kept a yellowed cutting from the local paper about the match.

• adjective

  Her cutting comment about his work left him silent.

• verb

  The chef was cutting the onions into thin slices.

• noun

  Each cutting should be planted in moist compost to take root.

Where does cutting come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'cut' appears in English around the 1200s, probably from a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse and Germanic words for slicing or knife-work, though the earliest trail is genuinely murky. By the late Middle Ages the present participle 'cutting' had settled in, and it soon hardened into a noun for various things produced by cutting: a shoot snipped from a plant for replanting, a piece clipped from a newspaper, and a channel dug through high ground for a road or railway. As an adjective it took on the figurative sense of words that wound, the way a blade does. The doubled t is the predictable spelling habit of English: a short, stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant when -ing is added, so cut becomes cutting rather than 'cuting'.

How the word is built

• cut (Old English: to make an incision)
• doubled t
• -ing (present participle / noun suffix)