[f. CUT v. 63: lit. ‘grass that cuts.’] A genus of grasses, Leersia, esp. the species L. oryzoides, the range of which extends as far north as the south of England.
1840. Bigelow, Flora (Bartlett, Dict. Amer.), Cut-grass … a species of grass, with leaves exceedingly rough backward, so as to cut the hands if drawn across them.
1849. Bromfield, in Phytologist, III. 683. Cut-grass … [is] remarkable for … extreme asperity, which even makes some precaution requisite to avoid cutting the hand, an accident that is said to befal the women employed in weeding it out of the rice-fields in Lombardy.
