Cute
adj ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 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."
- 5 Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute)
"Then Turpin being so very cute, He hid his money in his boot."
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- 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."
- 1 obviously contrived to charm wordnet
- 2 attractive especially by means of smallness or prettiness or quaintness wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I thought our boss was stubborn as a mule but actually he has his cute side."
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.
Related phrases
More for "cute"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.