cute
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /kjuːt/
homophone: Qt
rhymes: -uːt
Forms: form: cuter
form: cutest
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.
Senses: examples: text: Our reaction to cute attributes is understood as the way nature ensures mammals care for their young.
glosses: 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.
examples: text: Let's go to the mall and look for cute girls.
glosses: Lovable, charming, attractive or pleasing, especially in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way.
examples: text: He's got such cute buns.
text: I ordered her to strip for me and made her wiggle her cute little ass as she took off her panties.
ref: 2010, Vernon J. Geberth, Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation, page 116:
glosses: Sexually attractive or pleasing; gorgeous.
examples: text: The actor's performance was too cute for me. All that mugging to the audience killed the humor.
text: Don't get cute with me, boy!
text: "This time we aren't interested in anything cute or cryptic. We want the truth."
ref: 1957 May 23, William P. McGivern, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Magazine, page 102, column 2:
glosses: Affected or contrived to charm; mincingly clever; precious; cutesy.
examples: text: Then Turpin being so very cute,
He hid his money in his boot.
ref: ca. 1850. Anonymous, "Turpin Hero" (broadside ballad, probably originally dating to 18th century)
text: '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.
ref: 1908, Winston Churchill, Letter to his fianceé Clementine:
text: "The police are cute enough, of course, to choose either a Roman Catholic or a materialist as the magistrate."
ref: 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:
text: Cute trick, but can you do it consistently?
synonyms: clever
shrewd
glosses: Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute)
examples: text: There's a cute alternative proof of this using lambda calculus.
text: 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.
ref: 1963, The Tablet, volume 217:
text: 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.
ref: 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:
topics: mathematics
sciences
glosses: Evincing cleverness; surprising in its elegance or unconventionality (but of limited importance).
Synonyms: word: having features mainly attributed to infants and small
word: cuddly animals
sense: attractive or pleasing in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way
word: pretty
Derived terms: sense: Terms derived from cute
word: bicuspid
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute aggression
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute as a bug in a rug
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute as a bug's ear
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute as a button
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute as a pin
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute as a speckled pup
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute as corn
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute-'em-up
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cuteful
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute girls doing cute things
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute hoor
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cuteish
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutely
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cute meet
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cuten
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cuteness
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutensil
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutesome
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutester
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutesy
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutey
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutie
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutification
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: cutify
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: meet cute
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: noncute
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: overcute
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: supercute
sense: Terms derived from cute
word: uncute