In civil engineering, a cut or cutting is where soil or rock material from a hill or mountain is cut out to make way for a canal, road or railway line. In cut and fill construction it keeps the route straight and/or flat, where the comparative cost or practicality of alternate solutions (such as diversion) is prohibitive. Contrary to the general meaning of cutting, a cutting in construction is mechanically excavated or blasted out with carefully placed explosives. The cut may only be on one side of a slope, or directly through the middle or top of a hill. Generally, a cut is open at the top (otherwise it is a tunnel). A cut is (in a sense) the opposite of an embankment. When used in reference to transportation routes, it reduces the grade of the route. Cuts can be created by multiple passes of a shovel, grader, scraper or excavator, or by blasting. One unusual means of creating a cut is to remove the roof of a tunnel through daylighting. Material removed from cuts is ideally balanced by material needed for fills along the same route, but this is not always the case when cut material is unsuitable for use as fill. The word is also used in the same sense in mining, as in an open cut mine.

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