Other forms: cuttings
A cutting is a channel dug straight through high ground so a railway or a road can stay level instead of climbing over. Steep grass banks rising on both sides of the train, a brick bridge passing overhead, the sky suddenly a narrow strip.
Cutting leads several other lives. A cutting is a piece snipped off a plant and put in water or soil to grow a new one — take a cutting from the geranium. In Britain a press cutting is an article scissored out of a newspaper, where Americans say clipping. As an adjective, a cutting remark is one built to hurt, delivered flat and cold, and cutting-edge means the newest and most advanced there is. And cutting is the plain -ing form of cut: cutting onions, cutting costs, cutting your own hair badly.
1nounrailA passage dug through high ground to carry a railway or road.
“The line runs through a deep cutting just outside the town.”
2nounplantA piece cut from a plant and used to grow a new plant.
“She took a cutting from the rose and stood it in a jam jar.”
3nounarticleAn article cut out of a newspaper or magazine.
“He kept every press cutting about the case in a shoebox.”
4adjectivescathingUnkind and clearly meant to hurt.
“She made a cutting remark about his shoes and walked off.”
synonyms: scathing, barbed
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Cutting is cut with -ing on the end, and English works that ending twice over. Once it makes the verb form: she is cutting the bread. Once it names the thing the action leaves behind, and that is where the railway cutting comes from — it is what the cutting-through left. A plant cutting and a newspaper cutting are the same trick played on the same word.
Proto-Germanic
*kutjaną
Old Norse
*kytja
Middle English
cutten
English
cut
English, today
cutting
Built from
From cut + ing. cut comes 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