Meaning
To hurt or distress someone very deeply, especially in their feelings rather than their body. The image is a cut that goes past dead outer skin into living, sensitive flesh, so the idiom describes remarks, criticisms, or betrayals that strike at a person's most tender points. Neutral-to-literary register, very often passive - she was cut to the quick. Do not confuse with cut to the chase, which is about skipping preliminaries. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Here quick is the old adjective meaning alive, from Old English cwicu, a sense that survives in the quick and the dead. Etymonline dates the noun use of the quick, for the sensitive living flesh under a fingernail, to the 1520s. Related idioms came early: Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms dates touched to the quick and stung to the quick to the early 1500s, with such forms recorded in John Heywood's proverb collection and in Shakespeare - she cites Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors - and Fielding used stung to the quick in Joseph Andrews (1742). Cut to the quick is a later wording of the same image, and by about 1850 it was already treated as a cliche in American editorial comment, according to Ammer's Dictionary of Cliches. The literal sense - cutting or wearing down to living tissue, as when fingernails are trimmed too close - underlies the figurative one.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cut someone to the quick
- stung to the quick
- touched to the quick
Usage Examples
- Her joke about his failed business cut him to the quick, and he left the party without saying goodbye.
- The critic's harsh review cut the young novelist to the quick, though she pretended to shrug it off at dinner.
- I was cut to the quick when my brother forgot my birthday, and I told him exactly how it felt the next day.