breadcutter

English

Etymology

bread +‎ cutter

Noun

breadcutter (plural breadcutters)

1. A device for cutting bread, often consisting of a platform and a hinged blade.
   • 1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XI, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC:

     Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly move without banging against something.

2. A person employed to cut bread.
   • 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, translated by Thomas P. Whitney, New York: Harper & Row, Vol. II, Part III, Chapter 9, p. 273,

     He would willingly have cut six sides off the bread ration too, but he had no other bread, and he therefore limited himself to holding his bread ration over the hot plate, burning from all six sides the microbes implanted there by the hands of the bread-cutters […]

Derived terms

• breadcutter choke

Anagrams

• carburetted