cootie n.
1. (US) a body louse, a bedbug.
![[UK]](/static/img/flags/uk.png "United Kingdom") | Over the Top 20: ‘Cooties,’ or body lice, are the bane of Tommy’s existence. The aristocracy of the trenches very seldom call them ‘cooties,’ they speak of them as fleas. | |
![[US]](/static/img/flags/us.png "United States") | diary 3 July 🌐 Got off with permission from Bull to take a bath at Red Cross (or Coody [cootie]) bath house. | |
| Flying Fighter 13: There is eternal emnity between kooties and fleas. | |
| Lingo of No Man’s Lnd 24: COOTE This is a species of lice with extraordinary biting ability. | |
| diary 23 Mar. in One Man’s War (1928) 62: The rest of the boys stay undercover & kill cooties or write home. | |
| Smile A Minute 66: There is one thing over here which gives us a great deal more trouble than the Germans, and that is a alien insect which is called a ‘cutey’. | |
| Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo 175: To this day I am in doubt whether that man is more goofie than cootie or more cootie than goofie. | |
| ‘Hinky-Dinky’ in Amer. Ballads and Folk Songs 559: The cootie is the national bug of France, / The cootie’s found all over France. | |
| ‘Face in the Moonlight’ in Coll. Stories (1990) 138: Naomi, whose voice you could hear at nights [...] as you lay in lousy, cootie-ridden ‘jungles’. | |
| , | | (ref. to WWI) DAS 123/1: cutie n. a body louse. |
| ‘Prisoner and Escort’ in Cockade (1965) I ii: A first class prima nit – a cootie. | |
| Geronimo Rex 153: I am not so namby-pamby as not to mention the cooties. | |
![[NZ]](/static/img/flags/nz.png "New Zealand") | Dict. of Kiwi Sl. 30/1: cootie head louse, from Maori and Polynesian ‘kutu’, louse, and not unlike the Hindi word ‘khuthi’, a scab, used in army slang as ‘cootie’ to refer to body louse, and the Malayan ‘cootie’, a dog tick. | |
| Florida Roadkill 201: Al Capone lived on one of these islands when he had cooties. | |
| Reed Dict. of N.Z. Sl. [as cit. 1988]. | |
| ‘Bactine’ in Knockemstiff 112: She was picking pieces of lint off her frayed sweater, dropping them to the floor like little mashed cooties. |
2. (US) a general term of abuse.
| West Broadway 39: ‘I hit him because he says motion-picture actors was cooties’. | |
| Free To Love 2: A man leapt out, straight at the figures in the stream of light. ‘Cooties!’ he shouted, almost before his feet touched the pavement. ‘Get the-get!’. | |
| ‘Have Coolth’ in Gentleman Junkie (1961) 129: Watch yourself, Cootie [...] The next mark might tear your head off. |
3. (US) a small car.
| Adventures of a Boomer Op. 11: He didn’t have any horn; he didn’t need it on that ‘cootie’ of his. |
4. (US juv.) an imaginary germ or ‘bug’.
| (con. 1950s) ‘The Fifties’ in Eisen Age of Rock 2 (1970) 102: When really hard up, he would even overlook her b.o., cooties, flat chest. | |
| Pulp Fiction [film script] 44: You can use my straw. I don’t have kooties. | |
| Gutshot Straight [ebook] ‘You better not get your cooties all over my ancient foreskins’. | |
| Hard Bounce [ebook] ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I said in a tone more appropriate for denying a cootie infestation. |
5. (US) a fig. repellent quality that can be picked up from those one dislikes.
 | OnLine Dict. of Playground Sl. 🌐 cooties n. Initially introduced as a bug, cooties are some form of horrid affliction that you can get by coming into contact with anyone of the opposite sex, or sometimes same sex, if they’re gross. |
6. (US black) in fig. use of sense 1, an inexperienced, naïve young person, keen to improve his or her status.
| Jailhouse Jargon and Street Sl. [unpub. ms.]. |
In compounds
1. (US) bunches of hair worn by (young) women; the mocking nickname suggested that insects might nest in them.
| Asbury Park Press (NJ) 17 Mar. 3/4: The girls came to school with their hair smooth over the ears where tiny balloons or cootie coops had blossomed before. | |
| Corvallis Gaz.-Times (OR) 8 Nov. 3/3: The [Sat. Eve. Post] writer, in describing the present way girls have of wearing their hair with puffs covering their ears, calls them ‘cootie coops’. It makes one have a sort of crawly feeling to attend the movies, with these girls sitting all about you. | |
| West Broadway 96: I saw cootie coops and spit curls on the chickens [...] and heard the latest jazz on the drug-store records. | |
| Boston Post (MA) 20 June 16/1: A young girl who works for me would be really pretty if she did not [...] wear those hideous wads of hair over her ears. ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked her. ‘Clepoatra never fascinated Marc Antony with [...] cootie coops’. | |
| Eve. Sun (Baltimore, MD) 14 July 17/7: He Thinks Those ‘Cootie Coops’ Make the Girls Look Like Hottentots. | |
| Buffalo Eve, News 3 Nov. 8/5: When future historians learn that we called these things cootie coops, they won’t feel so inclined to call this the age of chivalry. | |
| ‘De Anopluris’ in Scientific Mthly Dec. 551: One may without risk of immediate social ostracism speak of the great wads of hair that girls wear over their ears as ‘cootie coops’. | |
| www.feministe.us 27 Dec. 🌐 Biggest surprise in filmland was a girl in cootie-coop hair and a dress designed to trip over, taking down the bad guys like bowling pins. |
2. (US) an untidy, filthy room.
| Kerry Drake [synd. cartoon] 10 Apr. Okay, Beagle-Nose! Gimme th’ Key to that Cootie-Coop You Call a Room. | |
| Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS) 21 Feb. 24/2: Some of the places [i.e. party venues] are no more than crusty cootie coops. |
(US black) a style of trousers, wide and draped and thus a possible home for lice.
| Free-Lance Pallbearers 100: Trousers known in the forties as ‘cootie drapes.’. |
1. (US) a flea-ridden dog.
| Sun (NY) 14 Sept. 9/4: Jazz music [...] has always seemed to set him howling with nose pointed skyward, just like the lowliest cootie garage in the canine kingdom. |
2. (US) the hair, esp. when styled elaborately (hist. post 1930s).
| Highland Vidette (KS) 6 Mar. 3/2: The soldiers have a [...] wholly appropriate name for the hair wads 10-cent store girrls puff out around the ears: theycall them cootie garages. | |
| Bennington Eve. Banner (VT) 4 May 4/4: On heads grew, each side, an ear. [...] When most of their day was devoted to beaux so they couldn’t spare time to wash [...] And had to develop the ‘cootie garage’. Who started the fashion of putting those cootie nests over the girls’ ears anyway? | |
| Babbitt (1974) 270: Hey, leggo, quit crushing me cootie-garage. | |
| Bemidji Dly Pioneer (MN) 9 Sept. 1/2: [headline] Purity Head Federation Deplores ‘Cootie Garages’. | |
| St Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) 17 Sept. 30/1: Mosat of the girls frizzed the inside of the hair over the ears to achieve these high puffs [...] known as ‘cootie garages’. | |
| 20 Mar. [synd. col.] All that is missing is those god-eared cootie garages we had in the last war. | |
| New Yorker 3 Jan. 15: Unlovely puffs we used to call ‘cootie garages’ [W&F]. |
3. (US) a form of moustache.
![[Can]](/static/img/flags/can.png "Canada") | Vancouver Sun (BC) 8 Jan. 6/5: I have been asked by well intentioned people why I wore ‘that thing’ on my lip. Wags of the weaker sort have referred to it as a cootie garage. | |
| Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA) 29 June 10/5: Perhaps you didn’t even recognize him. That famous cootie garage has been removed. The hermit has come from behind his ambush. | |
| Miami Dly News-Record (OK) 19 Nov. 3/4: Van Johnson Will Sport a ‘Cootie’ Garage in Movie [...] Van Johnson will hide behind a handlebar mustache for his role opposite Judy Garland. |
(US) a contemptuous person; also adj. cootie-hearted, despicable.
| (con. 1918) Mattock 319: Yeah, bawl about it. Snivel and bawl, you cootie-hearted bum! Yeah, old Cootie Heart, that’s you, by Jeezus! You don’t catch ’em on the outside, you hatch ’em inside, and now they’ve just begun to crawl through. |
(US teen) a comb.
| Times (Munster, IN) 19 Jan. 56/1: Slang keeps changing to keep up [...] ‘Cootie rack’ — Comb. |
In phrases
see separate entry.