First recorded in 1820–30
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Defying increasingly popular mass-production techniques, second-generation paper cutter Yuridia Torres Alfaro, 49, still makes her own stencils at her family’s workshop in Xochimilco, on the rural southern edge of Mexico City.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 27, 2022
Using a 19th-century guillotine-style paper cutter, Wagner cut thousands of pieces of paper in 10 different sizes, all rectangles in the same proportions that Powers favors.
From New York Times ● Jan. 11, 2022
Wildes headed to a paper cutter at the other end of Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts in St. Paul and began slicing his picture into 1-inch strips.
From Washington Times ● May 12, 2018
Reston’s Molly O’Boyle is particularly fond of the sound of a tabletop paper cutter doing its job.
From Washington Post
I peek into the bag at my feet: a paper cutter, white card stock, and a tin of forty-eight colored pencils, twelve more than the set I have.
From "Rules" by Cynthia Lord
They had not yet built any new Jerusalem, and the sword in their hand sometimes seemed hardly more than a paper-cutter.
From Time Magazine Archive
At certain seasons of the year it is covered so thickly with quail that "you could not put a paper-cutter between them."
From Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu by Woolson, Constance Fenimore
To Miss Adelaide Boodle This lady, as we have seen, had made Stevenson a present of a paper-cutter when he left Bournemouth; and it is in the character of the paper-cutter that he now writes.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 24 (of 25) by Stevenson, Robert Louis
The merchant makes obeisance and proffers you a paper-cutter or a box of candied ginger.
From East of Suez Ceylon, India, China and Japan by Penfield, Frederic Courtland
He did not need me before Monday, but he told me to come back that day at half-past seven and to bring a bone paper-cutter with me.
From The Long Day The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself by Richardson, Dorothy
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
