Word.ws English Dictionary

cut corners

cut corners verb: to bypass a prescribed route so as to gain competitive advantage or to circumvent traffic signals or other rules of the road.

Verb

cut corners (third-person singular simple present cuts corners, present participle cutting corners, simple past and past participle cut corners)

  1. To bypass a prescribed route so as to gain competitive advantage or to circumvent traffic signals or other rules of the road.
    • […] but I believe the old man did not ride fair, as he cut corners and joined in with them again […]1882, Dan Seffert, quoted in “Half Hours with Dan Seffert”, in Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, Volume 39, page 275
  2. (idiomatic) To do a less-than-thorough or incomplete job; to do something poorly; to take inappropriate shortcuts.
    • The guy who built the fence cut corners when sinking the posts, and the fence fell over in the last storm.
    • Do you know why Wendy's has square burgers? Because they don't cut corners.
    Synonyms:
    skimp, take short cuts, follow the path of least resistance, take the easy way out, half-ass

cut corners meaning in Indonesian

cut corners in Indonesian

bypass a prescribed route
memintas, cari singkat
do a less-than-thorough or incomplete job
berhemat, pelit modal

Synonyms of cut corners

All synonyms of cut corners

Forms of cut corners

third-person singular presentcuts corners
present participlecutting corners
past participlecut corners
pastcut corners

Questions about cut corners

What does cut corners mean?
Cut corners means to bypass a prescribed route so as to gain competitive advantage or to circumvent traffic signals or other rules of the road.
What is cut corners in Indonesian?
Cut corners in Indonesian is memintas, cari singkat, berhemat. See Cut corners meaning in Indonesian.
What part of speech is cut corners?
Cut corners is a verb.
What is the past tense of cut corners?
The past tense of cut corners is cut corners.

Words near cut corners in the dictionary

  1. cut capers
  2. cut card
  3. cut cards
  4. cut cavendish
  5. cut class
  6. cut corners
  7. cut crease
  8. cut deeper than a knife
  9. cut down
  10. cut down the tall poppy
  11. cut down to size

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cut corners (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-cut corners.ogg.

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