Word.ws English Dictionary

cut one's teeth

cut one's teeth verb: to begin; to gain early experience.

Verb

cut one's teeth (third-person singular simple present cuts one's teeth, present participle cutting one's teeth, simple past and past participle cut one's teeth)

  1. (idiomatic) To begin; to gain early experience.
    • He cut his teeth on flying model airplanes as a child, so aeronautical engineering came naturally.
    • Born and raised outside Copenhagen, he studied at the Royal Danish Design School, later cutting his teeth in Paris under Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel and in New York working for AD100 Hall of Famer Peter Marino.2026 May, Sam Cochran, “Feeling Zen”, in Architectural Digest, volume 83, number 4, page 100

Forms of cut one's teeth

third-person singular presentcuts one's teeth
present participlecutting one's teeth
past participlecut one's teeth
pastcut one's teeth

Questions about cut one's teeth

What does cut one's teeth mean?
Cut one's teeth means to begin; to gain early experience.
What part of speech is cut one's teeth?
Cut one's teeth is a verb.
What is the past tense of cut one's teeth?
The past tense of cut one's teeth is cut one's teeth.

Words near cut one's teeth in the dictionary

  1. cut one's eyeteeth
  2. cut one's losses
  3. cut one's lucky
  4. cut one's own throat
  5. cut one's stick
  6. cut one's teeth
  7. cut oneself
  8. cut out
  9. cut out of the same cloth
  10. cut out the middleman
  11. cut point

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cut one's teeth (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 one's teeth.ogg.

Cite this entry: “cut one's teeth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cut_one%27s_teeth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.