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

clear-cut

6 5.6
Land where people cut down all the trees at once, leaving it bare
  • adjective
  • /ˈklɪrˌkʌt/
  • Specialized
: 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

cleared
vsclear-cut
12 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
cutover
vsclear-cut
  • Specialized
1 7.5

Land where people have removed the trees by logging

emphasizes removal of all trees in one operation during logging

Antonyms

wooded
36 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'.