clean-cut
clean-cut adjective: having a neat, smart appearance.
Adjective
clean-cut (comparative more clean-cut, superlative most clean-cut)
- Having a neat, smart appearance
- a clean-cut young officer in a spotless uniform
- I fell down / To my bended knees, / Saying, "I dig farmers, / Don't shoot me, please!" / He cocked his rifle / And began to shout, / "You're that travelin' salesman / That I have heard about." / I said, "No! No! No! / I'm a doctor and it's true, / I'm a clean-cut kid / And I been to college, too."1964, Bob Dylan, “Motorpsycho Nitemare”, in Another Side of Bob Dylan
Examples of clean-cut in a sentence
- Of the fifty or so people present, most were clean-cut men in their twenties or thirties.2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN:
- Even when he’s not literally playing a Disney prince, he looks like one: poised, chiseled, giving off a clean-cut aura no matter his state of grooming.2021 September 16, A. A. Dowd, “Dan Stevens as a dashing robot lover? That computes”, in AV Club:
Forms of clean-cut
| comparative | more clean-cut |
|---|---|
| superlative | most clean-cut |
Origin of clean-cut
Apparently from the idea of being smoothly shaped and thus the opposite of “rough” or “coarse”.
Questions about clean-cut
- What does clean-cut mean?
- Clean-cut means having a neat, smart appearance.
- How do you use clean-cut in a sentence?
- Of the fifty or so people present, most were clean-cut men in their twenties or thirties.
- What part of speech is clean-cut?
- Clean-cut is an adjective.
Words near clean-cut in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: clean-cut (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “clean-cut.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/clean-cut. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.