coon

/kuːn/US/kun/

coon noun: a black person.

Noun

coon (plural coons)

(derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur) A black person.
- And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room?1979, Roger Waters, “In the Flesh”, in The Wall, performed by Pink Floyd
(Southern US, informal) A raccoon.
- He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels.1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter IX. "The Sea and the Desert", page 187.
- How about a glen bong for you and your 'coon?1963 Sterling North, Rascal, Avon Books (softcover), p 100
(derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur) A black race traitor.

Synonyms:

Oreo, Uncle Tom
(South Africa, informal) A member of a colorfully dressed dance troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.
(Southern US, ethnic, slur) A coonass; a white Acadian French person who lives in the swamps.
(US, dated) A sly fellow.
(African-American Vernacular) A black person who "plays the coon"; that is, who plays the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.
- This is especially true when your audience has such high expectations of your playing the coon, and thus providing symbolic assurance that a darker people are contained in their assigned social "place" as "subpersons."2012, Mia Mask, Contemporary Black American Cinema : Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, page 123

Verb

coon (third-person singular simple present coons, present participle cooning, simple past and past participle cooned)

(Southern US, colloquial) To hunt raccoons.
To traverse by crawling, as a ledge.
(Southern US, colloquial) To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.
- There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair.a. 1917, Roger Martin, “The Parson Goes A-Fishing”, Outing, W. B. Holland, volume LXIX, page 216
- 2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie.1957, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, volume XVI, Arkansas Historical Association
(Georgia, colloquial) To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.
(African-American Vernacular) To play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.
- Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters.1994, Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, page 234
- If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning.1999, Nelson George, Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball, U of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 52
(Southern US, colloquial, dated) To steal.
- Cooning water-melons [sic.] was a common custom, and young people would go out at night on such parties. To prevent any raids on our melon patch Grandfather set a trap alarm—which brought disaster.1940, John W. “Jack” Ganzhorn, I’ve Killed Men, Robert Hale Limited, page 58
- He kept on buying and selling horses, he said, sometimes paying for them in bogus, and sometimes cooning them. It was true he helped Malcolm Burnham break into Fred Able’s store1948, John Donald Kingsley, The Antioch Review, volume VIII

Proper noun capitalized: Coon

Coon (plural Coons)

A surname.

coon meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

coon in Hindi

कून

coon in Tamil

கூன்

coon in Marathi

कून

coon in Urdu

کائیاں, سیاہ زنجی

More languagesFewer languages

coon in Telugu: కూన్
coon in Malayalam: കൂവൻ
coon in Kannada: ಕೂನ್
coon in Nepali: कून

Examples of coon in a sentence

‘Listen, Mr Du Toit,’ he said at last, in an obvious effort to sound light-hearted. ‘Why go to all this trouble for the sake of a bloody coon?’1979, André Brink, A Dry White Season, Vintage, published 1998, page 149:
Another was having to “coon” across a fallen tree that had been felled and limbed to bridge a canyon or gully.1982, Edwin Van Syckle, “The River Pioneers”, in Early Days on Grays Harbor, Pacific Search Press, page 186:
From the classic toasts to the dirty dozens to the early blues⁵⁰ and now to gangsta rap lyrics—why not consider it all just a bunch of niggers cooning for the white man’s delight and dollars?2005, Kermit Ernest Campbell, “gettin’ our groove on”, rhetoric, language, and literacy for the hip hop generation, Wayne State University...
Then came the sidekick, a jet black madman dancing, and almost cooning out of the shadows that cancelled him.2006, A. Khaulid, The Great Book of Fire, Damon Hunter,, →ISBN, page 142:

Synonyms of coon

Forms of coon

Noun
plural	coons
Verb
third-person singular present	coons
present participle	cooning
past participle	cooned
past	cooned
Proper noun
plural	Coons

Origin of coon

Clipping of raccoon.

Words formed from coon

Phrases with coon

2 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with coon

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about coon

What does coon mean?: Coon means a black person.
What is coon in Hindi?: Coon in Hindi is कून. See Coon meaning in Hindi.
How do you use coon in a sentence?: ‘Listen, Mr Du Toit,’ he said at last, in an obvious effort to sound light-hearted. ‘Why go to all this trouble for the sake of a bloody coon?’
What part of speech is coon?: Coon can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce coon?: Coon is pronounced /kun/ (US).
What is the plural of coon?: The plural of coon is coons.

Words near coon in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: coon (page history and authors); Coon (page history and authors); coon (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); coon (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); coon (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); coon (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); coon (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); coon (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); coon (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); coon (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-coon.wav.

Cite this entry: “coon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/coon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.