cootie.
A louse (Pediculus humanus).
Meaning & usage
A louse (Pediculus humanus).
Any germ or contaminant, real or imagined, especially from the opposite gender (for pre-pubescent children).
I’m not drinking from his glass until I wash the cooties off it.
A nest-building female American coot (counterpart to cooter).
A sideswiper, a type of telegraph key.
Where this word comes from
Probably from Malay kutu (“flea, louse”) (and/or Tagalog/Māori). First attested in English in 1917 as British army slang during World War I.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.