Word.ws English Dictionary

cutting corners

cutting corners is the present participle and gerund 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 cutting corners

What is cutting corners the present participle and gerund of?
Cutting corners is the present participle and gerund of cut corners.

Words near cutting corners in the dictionary

  1. cutting board
  2. cutting boards
  3. cutting both ways
  4. cutting contest
  5. cutting contests
  6. cutting corners
  7. cutting deeper than a knife
  8. cutting down
  9. cutting down the tall poppy
  10. cutting down to size
  11. cutting edge

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cutting 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: “cutting corners.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cutting_corners. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.