cut to ribbons

1. 1.

   defeat totally

   “We must cut the other team to ribbons!”

   Broaderdemolish

Questions about cut to ribbons

What does cut to ribbons mean?

cut to ribbons means "defeat totally".

Is cut to ribbons a common word?

cut to ribbons is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.