To cut corners is to do something in a slipshod way in order to save expense or effort, typically by missing a step that should have been done or using something inferior when a proper job would have cost more. It is almost always used critically. A builder accused of cutting corners has skimped on materials or checks; a company that cuts corners on safety testing has taken a risk to save money. The phrase can shade into something more serious than laziness, suggesting work that is dishonest or unsafe rather than simply careless.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘cut corners’?
The phrase began life with a literal meaning, describing someone steering as close as possible round a corner rather than taking the wider, safer route. The earliest documented example found so far comes from an 1831 letter printed in a Baltimore sporting magazine, praising young gentlemen who “can handle the ribbands as well, and cut a corner as close, as any whip in old England,” referring to carriage drivers showing off their skill with the reins. Mark Twain used the same literal sense in his 1869 travel book Innocents Abroad, describing a gondolier who “cuts a corner so closely now and then… that I feel myself ‘scooching.’”
According to Etymonline, this literal sense of passing round a corner as closely as possible is recorded by 1847, and the figurative sense, an easy but risky shortcut, follows by 1882. The shift from a driving manoeuvre to a judgement about shoddy work happened quickly. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for the disapproving figurative sense comes from a Yorkshire newspaper in 1868, which condemned “the art of ‘cutting the corners,’ and other less legitimate tricks,” already linking the phrase with something underhand rather than merely efficient.
That sense of illegitimacy has stuck. The Oxford English Dictionary now defines the figurative meaning as doing something perfunctorily, often by leaving out a step or component or substituting something inferior, typically to reduce expense, and sometimes to describe acting illegally or untruthfully. In that respect it sits alongside other “cut” idioms about the standard of a piece of work, such as cut the mustard, though that phrase praises adequacy while cutting corners condemns its absence.