How \"Make the Cut\" Made the Cut
The phrase "make the cut" has been in your mouth since you first had to qualify for anything. A sports team, a job, a friend group's road trip. But here's what's wild: the phrase is younger than you'd think, older in different ways than you'd expect, and it smuggles in a word that's been doing extraordinary work for eight centuries.
E.B. White Coined It First (Sort Of)
The earliest known appearance of "make the cut" in print showed up in February 1943, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The author? E.B. White, in an essay called "Control."
Yes. That E.B. White. Charlotte's Web. The Elements of Style. The man who basically invented how Americans write clean sentences also handed us one of our most durable idioms. One possibility is that the phrase was already floating around in spoken language before White wrote it down. But until someone finds an earlier example, he gets the credit.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "make the cut" as "to succeed in being included in, or admitted to, something; to be good enough for something." Which is, honestly, the definition of half of adult life.
Golf Got Hold of It Twelve Years Later
The golf version took another twelve years to appear in print. The Oakland Tribune used it on January 16, 1955, referencing a 36-hole total score of 148 needed to qualify at Pebble Beach.
Today most people hear "make the cut" and think golf immediately. That's the power of one sport's jargon colonizing everyone else's vocabulary. But the phrase was already out there, doing general work, more than a decade before it landed on the fairway.
Now here's a detour worth taking. The OED's first citation for "cut" in golf at all (meaning spin applied to the ball, not the qualifying kind) comes from 1890. The source is a book simply called "Golf," written by Horace G. Hutchinson. That book was part of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, a series founded by Henry Somerset, the 8th Duke of Beaufort.
And the Badminton Library takes its name from Badminton country house. The same place that gave its name to the racket sport with the shuttlecock. So if you have ever wondered why badminton is called badminton, now you know, and you got there through golf etymology. Language is a strange neighborhood.
Meanwhile, In a Film Studio
"Cut" as a film term has its own separate history running alongside all of this. As a noun meaning an immediate transition between shots, it was in use from the early 20th century. The OED's first written example comes from "The Technique of the Photoplay," second edition, 1913, by Epes Winthrop Sargent.
The first time "cut" appeared as a director's actual command (the word you shout when you want filming to stop) was documented in the Santa Cruz Evening News on December 22, 1915. Over a century of directors yelling the same single syllable.
In 2017, a book called "Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV" brought both meanings together in one title. Film editing. Qualifying. The phrase doing double duty without breaking a sweat.
The Word That Started It All
"Cut" itself is ancient. It showed up in the late 12th century meaning exactly what you'd expect: to separate something using a sharp implement. The earliest known example is from Layamon's Brut, composed sometime before 1200.
By 1292, "cutpurse" was already appearing in legal Latin manuscripts, specifically the Eyre Roll Cumberland. A cutpurse was a pickpocket who literally cut the strings holding a purse to a belt. The word was common enough by then to show up in legal documents, which means it was common enough in daily life to need its own name.
One word. Eight hundred years. Pickpockets, golf courses, film studios, and E.B. White's desk.
Why This Word Is Worth Loving
"Cut" is a word nerd's dream because it keeps multiplying. Verb, noun, command. Sport and cinema and street crime. Each meaning is genuinely distinct but they all share the same root idea: separation. A clear line between what's in and what's out.
When you "make the cut," you're choosing not to be the thing that gets removed. You're the part that stays. Eight hundred years of sharpness, compressed into three words.
Next time you're staring at a word puzzle deciding which letters to commit to, remember: you're using a word that's been doing work since before 1200. It cuts. It has never stopped.
Source: Grammarphobia