cute - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Etymology

Aphetic form of acute, originally meaning “keenly perceptive or discerning, shrewd” (1731). Meaning transferred to “pretty, fetching” by US students (slang) c. 1834. Meaning drifted further to describe the pleasing attraction to features usually possessed by the young.

Pronunciation

Adjective

cute (comparative cuter, superlative cutest)

  1. Possessing physical features, behaviors, personality traits or other properties that are mainly attributed to infants and small or cuddly animals; e.g. fair, dainty, round, and soft physical features, disproportionately large eyes and head, playfulness, fragility, helplessness, curiosity or shyness, innocence, affectionate behavior.
    Our reaction to cute attributes is understood as the way nature ensures mammals care for their young.
  2. Lovable, charming, attractive or pleasing, especially in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way.
    Let's go to the mall and look for cute girls.
  3. Sexually attractive or pleasing; gorgeous.
    He's got such cute buns.
    • 2010, Vernon J. Geberth, Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation, page 116:
      I ordered her to strip for me and made her wiggle her cute little ass as she took off her panties.
  4. Affected or contrived to charm; mincingly clever; precious; cutesy.
    The actor's performance was too cute for me. All that mugging to the audience killed the humor.
    Don't get cute with me, boy!
    • 1957 May, William P. McGivern, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Magazine, page 102, column 2:
      "This time we aren't interested in anything cute or cryptic. We want the truth."
  5. Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute)
    Synonyms: clever, shrewd
    • ca. 1850. Anonymous, "Turpin Hero" (broadside ballad, probably originally dating to 18th century)
      Then Turpin being so very cute,
      He hid his money in his boot.
    • 1908, Winston Churchill, Letter to his fianceé Clementine:
      'Filled with old doddering peers, cute financial magnates, clever wirepullers, big brewers with bulbous noses. All the enemies of progress are there — weaklings, sleek, slug, comfortable, self-important individuals.
      Cute trick, but can you do it consistently?
  6. (especially mathematics) Evincing cleverness; surprising in its elegance or unconventionality (but of limited importance).
    There's a cute alternative proof of this using lambda calculus.
    • 1963, The Tablet‎[1], volume 217:
      Cute solution to pin one Knight by unpinning the other and so force discovered guard for the Bishop: it took me hours to find that Bishop key.
    • 2012, “Vertex neighborhoods, low conductance cuts, and good seeds for local community methods”, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining‎[2]:
      We state a cute result that can be derived from our calcuations[_sic_]. It is not applied anywhere later, but shows that graphs with heavy tails and large clustering coefficients have large cores.

Usage notes

All meanings except for the first one are less commonly found outside of North America.

Synonyms

Derived terms

Descendants

Translations

having features mainly attributed to infants and small or cuddly animals — see also lovely,‎ precious,‎ pretty

attractive or pleasing in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way

dated: mentally keen or discerning; clever, shrewd

Albanian

Pronunciation

Verb

cute

  1. second-person singular aorist of cut

Danish

Etymology

Borrowed from English cute.

Adjective

cute

  1. (youthful) cute, adorable
    • 2010, Kirsten Sonne Harild, Pony & Co. 4 - Lises forvandling, Gyldendal A/S, →ISBN:
    • 2010, Jesper Staunstrup, At være fremmed..., BoD – Books on Demand, →ISBN, page 187:
      Dyret er altså bare ikke cute... Det er en stor rottelignende dræber, der er altædende.
      (please add an English translation of this quotation)
  2. (youthful) sweet, attractive (of a person, especially a prospective partner)
    • 2014, Ina Bruhn, Maja og Dancer: Hestene på Ponygården 3, Rosinante & Co, →ISBN:
    • 2013, Anders Haahr Rasmussen, Modellen: #dayinthelife, Art People, →ISBN:
      Josephine Skriver har tidligere haft problemer med sit runde, cute ansigt og har det for så vidt stadigvæk.
      (please add an English translation of this quotation)

Synonyms

Italian

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin cutis.

Pronunciation

Noun

cute f (plural cuti)

  1. (anatomy) cutis, skin (of a person)
    Synonym: pelle

Derived terms

Latin

Noun

cute

  1. ablative singular of cutis

Middle English

Noun

cute

  1. (Catholicon Anglicum) alternative form of cote (“coot”)

Pali

Alternative forms

Alternative scripts

Adjective

cute

  1. locative singular masculine/neuter & accusative plural masculine & vocative singular feminine of cuta, which is past participle of cavati (“to die away from a world”)

Romanian

Etymology

Inherited from Latin cōtem, accusative of cōs. The expected result would have been *coate in Romanian, but may have been influenced by cuțit and ascuți.[1]

Pronunciation

Noun

cute f (plural **cute)

  1. whetstone
    Synonym: gresie

References

  1. ^ “cute”, in DEX online—Dicționare ale limbii române (Dictionaries of the Romanian language) (in Romanian), 2004–2026

Vietnamese

Etymology

From English cute.

Pronunciation

Adjective

cute

  1. cute
    Con cún cute quá. ― What a cute puppy.

Derived terms