Word.ws English Dictionary

cuts down to size

cuts down to size is the third-person singular simple present indicative of cut down to size.

Meaning of cut down to size

Verb

cut down to size (third-person singular simple present cuts down to size, present participle cutting down to size, simple past and past participle cut down to size)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To humble or humiliate, especially someone or something that is perceived as overly domineering or too proud.
    • The war was seen by the Foreign Office as a golden opportunity to undo the UN Partition Resolution and cut Israel down to size'.2000, Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The "new Historians", page 152
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see cut, down, size.
    • There is, however, another general approach to cutting the potential client population down to size: establish criteria, grounded in the Bank's basic strategy, that restrict the range of enterprises that the Bank tries to reach.1995, Sidney Winter, Small and Medium-size Enterprises in Economic Development

Questions about cuts down to size

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

Words near cuts down to size in the dictionary

  1. cuts both ways
  2. cuts corners
  3. cuts deeper than a knife
  4. cuts down
  5. cuts down the tall poppy
  6. cuts down to size
  7. cuts for sign
  8. cuts in
  9. cuts in line
  10. cuts into
  11. cuts it

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cuts down to size (page history and authors); cut down to size (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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