Word.ws English Dictionary

cut-throat

cut-throat is the alternative spelling of cutthroat.

Meaning of cutthroat

Noun

cutthroat (countable and uncountable, plural cutthroats)

  1. A murderer who slits the throats of victims.
  2. An unscrupulous, ruthless or unethical person.
    • The jail had not housed a white criminal in over four years, and there is seldom a prisoner of any kind, the Sheriff being a lazy no-good, prone to take his ease with a bottle of liquor, and let trouble-makers and thieves, even the most dangerous type of cutthroats, run free and wild.1948, Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Part One, 1
  3. (uncountable) A three-player pocket billiards game where the object is to be the last player with at least one ball still on the table.

See all 6 meanings of cutthroat

Forms of cut-throat

Noun
pluralcut-throats
Adjective
comparativemore cut-throat
superlativemost cut-throat

Phrases with cut-throat

Questions about cut-throat

What is cut-throat the alternative spelling of?
Cut-throat is the alternative spelling of cutthroat.

Words near cut-throat in the dictionary

  1. cut-purse
  2. cut-purses
  3. cut-rate
  4. cut-set
  5. cut-sets
  6. cut-throat
  7. cut-throat razor
  8. cut-throat razors
  9. cut-throats
  10. cut-through
  11. cut-throughs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cut-throat (page history and authors); cutthroat (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.

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Cite this entry: “cut-throat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cut-throat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.