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✅ Easy to see 🌲 To remove trees 🌲 No trees left
clear-cut

clear-cut

1 5.6
Land where people cut down all the trees at once, leaving it bare
  • adjective
  • /ˈklɪrˌkʌt/
  • Specialized
translation icon : tala rasa
  • Starbucks spent $200,000 to help Mexican coffee growers improve the quality of beans by raising them under a forest canopy instead of in clear-cut areas.
  • clear-cut logging
  • clear-cut forest
  • clear-cut land

Examples

  • I walked a mile along the logging road, climbed up through a recent clear-cut, and found a spot to stand at the edge of the forest in an area where I had seen fresh deer tracks and browse a few days earlier.

    Blog text (20)

  • Before 1980, the mountain was surrounded by a patchwork of forested and clear-cut land in varying stages of reforestation.

    Academic text (1997)

  • They stood at the top of a steep slope shorn of trees in an old clear-cut.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • Clear-cut logging had destroyed the coastal rainforests of British Columbia.

    Academic text (2000)

  • Edie stays in a motel, but she spends most of her time sitting on the deck outside the Airstream, looking over the two acres of private clear-cut she helped us buy a couple of years ago.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • His subsequent projects have included organizing opposition to the clear-cut logging of Tasmania's wilderness forest, a forest that includes the world's tallest hardwood trees.

    Academic text (1990)

  • Although they receive no financial compensation for the destruction of their lands, when a trapline is clear-cut, a trapper loses much more than his or her livelihood.

    Academic text (2004)

  • Nick Haddad and Robert Cheney used an innovative approach in which the US Forest Service created clear-cut forest patches (1.6 ha) in a predominantly pine forest matrix at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

    Academic text (1997)

  • The logging company completed a clear-cut of the area, leaving behind a barren landscape.

  • After the clear-cut, the forest was dramatically changed, with no trees remaining in sight.

Synonyms

cutover
vsclear-cut
  • Specialized
7.5

Land where people have removed the trees by logging

emphasizes removal of all trees in one operation during logging
cleared
vsclear-cut
1.8

Made free of trees, plants, or other things so it is open

specifies removal of all trees at once as a logging practice

Antonyms

wooded
32 2.4

An area with many trees growing on it

Surface Forms

clear-cut positive

Morphology

clear-cut = clear + cut (transparent) = clear + cut

A literal compound of 'clear' + 'cut' describing land made clear by cutting trees, so learners can derive the meaning from the parts.

Etymology

Clear-cut began as a way to talk about land where people cut down all the trees at once. It joins clear ('free from') and cut ('cut down'), so a clear-cut area is land that has been 'cleared by a cut'.