Word.ws English Dictionary

cuts corners

cuts corners is the third-person singular simple present indicative of cut corners.

Meaning of cut corners

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.
    Synonyms:
    skimp, take short cuts, follow the path of least resistance, take the easy way out, half-ass

Questions about cuts corners

What is cuts corners the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Cuts corners is the third-person singular simple present indicative of cut corners.

Words near cuts corners in the dictionary

  1. cuts away one's soul
  2. cuts back
  3. cuts bait
  4. cuts below
  5. cuts both ways
  6. cuts corners
  7. cuts deeper than a knife
  8. cuts down
  9. cuts down the tall poppy
  10. cuts down to size
  11. cuts for sign

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cuts corners (page history and authors); 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.

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