lop off

present singular third person lops off · participle present lopping off · participle past lopped off · past lopped off

1. transitiveTo cut off as the top or extreme part of anything, especially to prune a small limb off a shrub or tree, or sometimes to behead someone.

   TPE's Manchester Airport-Newcastle has both ends lopped off to become Manchester Victoria-York.

   2021 June 30, Philip Haigh, “Regional trains squeezed as ECML congestion heads north”, in RAIL, number 934, page 52

   2 more examples

   Sinkfield reduced his guests to myopic drunkenness one evening, induced them to bring forward their maps and charts, lop off a little here, add a bit there, and adjust the center of the county to meet his requirements. He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor.

   1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

   In the early eighties, there weren’t a lot of restaurants in Soho, outside of Fanelli’s, the bar on Prince Street. On the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets was Food, a cooperative restaurant that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark began as an ongoing art happening that later evolved into an actual restaurant. Gordon was best known for his “building cuts,” in which he would lop off sections of floor and ceiling within abandoned buildings. From my perspective, there was nothing better than this—nothing.

   2015, Kim Gordon, chapter 19, in Carrie Thornton, editor, Girl in a Band, New York: Dey st., →ISBN, page 119

   Synonyms: snead