Word.ws English Dictionary

cutting down to size

cutting down to size is the present participle and gerund 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 cutting down to size

What is cutting down to size the present participle and gerund of?
Cutting down to size is the present participle and gerund of cut down to size.

Words near cutting down to size in the dictionary

  1. cutting contests
  2. cutting corners
  3. cutting deeper than a knife
  4. cutting down
  5. cutting down the tall poppy
  6. cutting down to size
  7. cutting edge
  8. cutting edges
  9. cutting fluid
  10. cutting fluids
  11. cutting for sign

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cutting 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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Cite this entry: “cutting down to size.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cutting_down_to_size. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.