Other forms: cutting, cuts
To cut is to go through something with a blade. Bread under a knife, a thread with scissors, a nurse cutting the tape at the end of a bandage.
Cut reaches far past the blade. You cut prices, cut a budget, cut your hours — every one of those means reduce. Films are cut in the edit, a director shouts 'cut!' to stop the camera, and the version you watch is the final cut. As a noun it is both a wound (a cut on his thumb) and a share of the money (his cut was ten percent). The form never changes: cut today, cut yesterday, have cut — there is no -ed anywhere. Watch the small words that follow: you cut something IN half, cut something OUT of a magazine, cut DOWN a tree.
1verbcutTo divide or open something with a blade.~68%
“She cut the cake into eight pieces.”
2verbreduceTo reduce an amount.~10%
“The council cut the bus service to one an hour.”
3verbstopTo stop filming, or to move from one shot to the next.~16%
“The scene cuts to a corridor at night.”
4nounwoundA wound made by something sharp.~2%
“He washed the cut under the tap.”
5nounreductionA reduction in an amount.~2%
“Everyone took a pay cut that year.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Cut is not an old English word. It arrives in Middle English as cutten, taken from Norse — Old Norse kutta and its relatives, from a Proto-Germanic verb for cutting. The Scandinavian languages still carry the family: kuta, 'to cut or chip with a knife', and kytti, 'a knife'. Small, sharp words, for a verb English now uses on bread and on budgets alike.
Proto-Germanic
*kutjaną
Old Norse
*kytja
Middle English
cutten
English, today
cut
Built from
From Middle English cutten, of gmq origin, from Old Norse kytja, kutta, from Proto-Germanic kutjaną, kuttaną (“to cut”), of uncertain origin, perhaps related to Proto-Germanic kwetwą (“meat, flesh”) (compare Old Norse kvett (“meat”)). Sometimes instead compared to French couteau, itself from Latin culter (“knife”). Copmare Scots kut, kit (“to cut”)); also akin to Middle Swedish kotta (“to cut or carve with a knife”) (compare dialectal Swedish kåta, kuta (“to cut or chip with a knife”), Swedish kuta, kytti (“a knife”)), Norwegian Bokmål kutte (“to cut”), Norwegian Nynorsk kutte (“to cut”), Icelandic kuta (“to cut with a knife”), Old Norse kuti (“small knife”), Norwegian kyttel, kytel, kjutul (“pointed slip of wood used to strip bark”). snithen (from snīþan), still attested in dialectal snithe and snead. See snide. The adjective sense of "drunk" (now rare and now usually used in the originally humorous derivative form of half-cut) dates from the 17th century, from cut in the leg or to have cut your leg, a for being very drunk.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA