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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

cute.

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.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/kjuːt/
  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.
  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!
  5. Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute)

    Cute trick, but can you do it consistently?
  6. Evincing cleverness; surprising in its elegance or unconventionality (but of limited importance).

    especially
    There's a cute alternative proof of this using lambda calculus.
Where this word comes from

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.

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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.