cut out
Formscuts out, cutting out, cut out
Formscuts out, cutting out, cut out
- 1
- 2To stop doing or using something, or to refrain from it altogether.
He cut out coffee for a month to see if he would sleep better.
If you two don't cut it out, I'm turning this car around.
Similarstop, quit, drop, eliminate
Note
A phrasal verb whose parts can stay together or split around the object: cut out sugar, cut sugar out, and O. Henry has a curt "Cut that joshing out." A pronoun must go in the middle, so it is cut it out, never cut out it. Said on its own, Cut it out! is a blunt, informal order to stop doing something annoying.
- 3To remove something or someone, or to leave it out entirely.
Selling directly online lets small makers cut out the middleman.
After the betrayal, she cut him out of her life completely.
Similareliminate, exclude, remove, bypass
Oppositeinclude
Note
Its best-known home is the idiom cut out the middleman, said of dealing directly and skipping whoever took a share in between. With a person as the object it means shutting someone out altogether, as when you cut a former friend out of your life and want nothing more to do with them.
- 4To stop working or switch off; of someone on a phone call or similar link, to become inaudible or be disconnected.
The motor cut out halfway up the hill, and we rolled back to the curb.
Her voice kept cutting out, so we switched from video to a regular call.
Note
Machines and voices both cut out: an engine stops dead, and a caller whose signal drops goes silent, so You keep cutting out blames the line rather than the speaker. It never takes an object. The device built to make a circuit stop like this on purpose is a trip switch, named with the same words.
- 5Having what it takes for a particular activity or purpose.
After one season of night shifts, he decided he wasn't cut out for nursing.
Few people are cut out to be air traffic controllers.
Note
An idiom heard mostly in the negative or in a question: not cut out for city life, is he cut out for manager? It takes for before a noun or an -ing form, and to be before a role, as when Mezz Mezzrow writes in Really the Blues (1946) that he was cut out to be a jazzman. Plain positive statements are rarer.
- 6A piece cut away from a larger whole, such as a shape cut from paper.
Each student traced a paper cut-out of a leaf onto green construction paper.
He sanded the plywood cut-outs before painting them as toy soldiers.
- 7A free-standing, rigid printed figure, usually life-size, often displayed to promote something.
A life-size cardboard cut-out of the quarterback greeted shoppers at the store entrance.
The campaign shipped cut-outs of the candidate to every field office.
Note
The usual collocation is cardboard cut-out: Nathan Rabin's 2012 review of The Simpsons recalls Barney pummeling a cardboard cut-out of Homer in an attack ad. Because such a figure looks real but is flat and hollow, the word lends itself to fakery, as when Jug Suraiya finds that a sentry is only a cut-out sentry, guarding a cut-out border.
- 8To oust someone from a position, or to take their place.
Within a month, the charming stranger had cut out all of Ada's other admirers.
A rival firm cut them out as the city's main supplier of road salt.
Similarsupplant, oust, displace, replace
Note
The rival is the object here: you cut someone out by taking the place they held, classically in courtship. Lady's Realm in 1899 speaks of cutting a man out in the affections of his lady-love. Where the removing sense simply drops a person, this one puts someone new in their place, and in or as names what was lost.
- 9
- 10To arrange or prepare something; usually used in the passive.
The new mayor has her work cut out for her after years of neglect at city hall.
Firefighters had their work cut out for them as the wind pushed the blaze toward town.
Note
Today this sense lives almost entirely in one fixed phrase, have your work cut out (for you), said when a hard task lies ahead: the work is already marked out and waiting. It follows have or got, usually in the passive, and the closing for you can be dropped. Being suited to something is a different idiom, cut out for a job, with no work in it.
- 11A hole or space left where material has been removed by cutting.
The countertop needs a cut-out for the sink before it is installed.
Rows of small cut-outs in the metal screen let air flow through.
Similaropening, hole, aperture
Note
The noun is hyphenated where the verb is written open: you cut out a hole for the sink and are left with a cut-out. Engineers use it for openings in structural parts, such as plates with large cut-outs, and fashion uses it before another noun, as in a dress with cut-out sides.
- 12A trusted middleman who links two parties, especially in espionage.
The agency used a cut-out so that its officers never met the informant face to face.
Investigators believe the payments were routed through a cut-out to hide who was really behind them.
Similarintermediary, go-between, middleman
Note
Spies use the word for the link that keeps two parties apart. Britain's wartime Special Operations Executive explained it in 1943, and Duane Clarridge's CIA memoir A Spy for All Seasons (1997) calls his go-between a cutout, written solid, "as it is called in the trade." Distance is the point, so a cut-out may know very little beyond the messages carried.
- 13A cookie cut into a particular shape with a cookie cutter.
Brush each cut-out with egg wash before sliding the tray into the oven.
She baked three dozen pumpkin-shaped cut-outs for the school party.
- 14Any of various devices that stop the flow of a current, especially an electric current, such as a trip switch.
The mechanic traced the dead battery to a faulty cut-out in the charging circuit.
A thermal cut-out shuts off the pump if the motor starts to overheat.
Note
Controls engineers pair it with cut-in: the cut-out point is where a control opens the circuit, the cut-in point is where it closes it again, and the gap between them is the differential. On older cars a cut-out was the relay that disconnected the dynamo from the battery whenever the dynamo's voltage fell too low.
- 15To stop or seize something on its way, such as a pass, before it reaches its target.
The center back read the play early and cut out the cross before it reached the striker.
Their midfielders kept cutting out our through balls, so we never got near the goal.
Similarintercept
Note
Sports reporting uses it for stopping a pass on its way: defenders cut out a cross, a through ball or a final ball before it reaches its target. Saj Chowdhury's 2011 BBC match report praises Blackpool's back line for cutting out final balls to Meireles twice in the first half. The object is the ball, not the player it was meant for.
- 16A ready-made piece of clip art that can be added to a document or design.
The design software includes a library of cut-outs, from cartoon animals to holiday borders.
She dragged a cut-out of a smiling sun onto the front page of the newsletter.
Note
A computing sense that keeps the language of scissors and paper: the picture counts as a cut-out because, like a shape cut from paper, it is a separate piece made to be placed on a page. In practice it is simply one item of clip art, added to a document or design.
- 17To separate an animal from the rest of a herd.
Two stockmen cut out the yearlings and drove them to the far paddock.
A well-trained horse can cut out a single steer with little help from its rider.
Similarseparate
Note
Stockmen in the United States, Australia and New Zealand use it for working a single animal or a group away from the herd. Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life sets it in quotation marks, describing a man who had "cut out" cattle on the Carrum Plains. The American noun names the separating itself, or the place where the animals are gathered.
- 18An electrical switch for redirecting current into a different circuit or for shortening a circuit.
The operator threw the cut-out, sending the current from the main line onto the branch circuit.
At night the clerk used the cut-out to take his instrument out of the circuit, so messages passed straight through.
Note
Telegraph offices used this switch to reroute current rather than stop it, moving it onto another circuit or shortening the circuit it was on. That is the difference from the device that halts a current, which simply breaks the flow.
- 19The separating of a group of cattle from a herd, or the place where the separated animals are gathered.
After the cut-out, the calves were branded and turned back in with their mothers.
Two riders kept the calves together at the cut-out near the corral while the rest of the crew worked the main herd.
Note
A word of the American roundup, used for both the act and the place. In Fay E. Ward's The Cowboy at Work (1958), once the herd has been worked, the calves in the cut-out groups are branded and turned loose with their mothers, while strays go to a separate herd. Before another noun it marks what was separated, as in cut-out groups.
- 20To take a ship out of a harbor or similar anchorage by moving in between the ship and the shore.
Under cover of darkness, the frigate's boats slipped into the bay to cut out a brig lying at anchor.
The admiral ordered his captains to cut out any merchant ship sheltering under the fort's guns.
Note
A naval maneuver whose name explains itself: the attackers slip between the anchored ship and the shore, cutting her off from help on land, and then take her out to sea. The ship is the object, and in keeping with the sea's habit she is her, so sailors cut her out of a harbor rather than cutting it.
- 21To serve time in prison instead of paying fines.
Rather than pay the eight hundred dollars he owed the court, he cut out in the lockup over Christmas.
Most of the blokes in that wing weren't hardened crims, just fine defaulters cutting out.
Note
Australian slang for paying a court with time instead of money: someone who cannot pay their fines cuts out in jail instead. Outside Australia it is easily heard as the "leave suddenly" sense, so formal writing and readers elsewhere are better served by the plain phrase serving time in lieu of fines.
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Practice
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Origin
Formed from the verb cut out.