clear-cut

See also: clearcut, and clear cut

English

Adjective

clear-cut (comparative more clear-cut or clearer-cut, superlative most clear-cut or clearest-cut)

1. Alternative spelling of clear cut
   • 1892, “John Bellenden”, in George Eyre-Todd, editor, Scottish Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (Abbotsford Series of the Scottish Poets), Glasgow: William Hodge & Co., pages 113–114:

     The most striking passage of the poem is the descant on nobility, which occupies nine out of the twenty-nine stanzas. Some of the lines in this have all the incisiveness of the clearest-cut aphorism.

   • 1922 December 3, “A Thousand Days in 300 Theatres before Release Date”, in The Film Daily, volume XXII, number 62:

     When you deal for “Heart’s Haven” you are playing with a big-time picture. It is the clearest-cut answer to the query, “What does the public want?” that has been given by any picture released in months.

   • 1934, John Clark Archer, Faiths Men Live By (Nelson’s Religious Series), New York, N.Y.: Thomas Nelson and Sons, page 96:

     Legislation was to Mencius a phase of external discipline futile in the making of morality. To live naturally is to achieve virtue. He recognized the ancients, and acknowledged that a few of them were perfect (cf. Bk. IV, Pt. I, 4), but he insisted that men—himself, at least—could do without them, for of what value, said he, were they, if virtue lies within you? His theory is clearer-cut than anything Confucius had proposed; wherein he makes a weighty contribution.

   • 1943 July and August, “Red Light for Danger”, in Railway Magazine, page 189:

     One of the questions which seem to recur more often that most is the reason for selection of the red light as a danger signal on railways. As in so many cases there is no clear-cut answer.

   • 1949 October, Harold A. Lowen, “[Our Moody Readers] Answers to Unbelief”, in William Culbertson, editor, Moody Monthly, volume 50, number 2, Mount Morris, Ill.: The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, page 67, column 1:

     I want to congratulate you on the two outstanding articles in the April and May issues, which I believe would lend themselves excellently for combination in one booklet as they seem to complement each other and are to my mind the clearest-cut answers to modernism and unbelief.

   • 1968, Louis Heren, The New American Commonwealth, New York, N.Y., Evanston, Ill.: Harper & Row, →LCCN, page 38:

     There were frequent assertions in the past that the “advice and consent” clause meant something more than the ratification of treaties and a late telephone call, but the fact of the matter is that Senator Fulbright’s reading of the Constitution is now widely accepted. Even with domestic matters, where the constitutional position is clearer-cut than with foreign affairs, it is the President who drafts the legislative program.

   • 1971, Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point‎, Holt, Reinhart & Winston, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 104:

     I had no doubt as to how the vast majority of voters would respond. I was convinced that given such a clear-cut choice, the American people would elect to move forward with a program of social progress.

   • 1972, A[lexander] G[eorge] Karczmar, “Introduction: What we know now, will know in the future, and possibly cannot ever know in neurosciences”, in A. G. Karczmar, J[ohn] C[arew] Eccles, editors, Brain and Human Behavior, New York, N.Y., Heidelberg, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, →ISBN, pages 13–14:

     Altogether, they admit that the difficulties of mind-brain antimony have not been by any means surmounted; in fact, they are better off than Aristotle only in the sense that their taxonomy so much emphasized by Toulmin is clearer-cut than that of the Greeks or of Aquinas, and that they have the advantage of 2,500 years of additional biological studies which, with all the advances made, at least did not bring about reductionism, although they did not seem to bear as clearly on the subject of dualism.

   • 1996, James Lambert, The Macquarie Book of Slang, Sydney: Macquarie Library, page v:

     The differences between slang, colloquialism and jargon are not clear-cut.

   • 2011, Tom Fordyce, Rugby World Cup 2011: England 12-19 France‎:

     France were supposedly a team in pieces, beaten by Tonga just a week ago and with coach Marc Lievremont publicly berating his players, but so clear-cut was their victory that much of the atmosphere had been sucked from the contest long before the end.

   • 2021 December 29, Paul Stephen, “Rail's accident investigators”, in RAIL, number 947, pages 30–31:

     While in the most serious cases mounting an investigation is usually mandatory, there are other occasions where it is less clear-cut or when it is concluded that an investigation would not fulfil RAIB's objectives to improve safety or prevent future accidents.

Further reading

• “clear-cut”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “clear-cut”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.