cut

   1. to render (a male) sexually impotent

   Of humans by vasectomy, of domestic animals by castration:

    The bull calves are cut. (Marshall, 1818)

   2. to dilute in order to cheat customers

   Mainly of intoxicants and drugs sold illegally, from the practice of dividing before adulteration:

    The real thing. Pharmaceutical coke. Not the cut street stuff. (Robbins, 1981)

   3. drunk

   Literally, in dialect, tacking or weaving. Often as half-cut:

    On many a night we left the canteen halfcut. (F. Richards, 1936)

   4. an illegal or concealed commission payment

   Common criminal and commercial use, again from the dividing. Whence as a verb, to take such a payment:

    Crap games were played in the corridor with the keeper 'cutting' the game. (Lavine, 1930, writing of prisoners in a police station)

   5. a reduction in the size of the increase desired or expected by the recipient

   Normally of spending in the public sector:

    So, too has [grown] the number of welfare lobbyists raised in that publicsector culture who protest that every reform is a 'cut' while spending continues to climb. {Daily Telegraph, 5 December 1995)

   6. American

   to kill

   Not necessarily with a knife:

    You Americans — you are so strange. You 'put a man down', or you 'cut him', or you 'burn him', or you 'put him away' or 'take him for a ride'. But you will never say you killed him. (Sanders, 1970)