Word.ws English Dictionary

cooties

/ˈkuːtiz/

cooties is the plural of cootie.

Meaning of cootie

Noun

cootie (plural cooties)

  1. (British-Army, Canada, US, colloquial, dated, slang) A louse (Pediculus humanus).
    • "Tell Rilla I'm glad her war-baby is turning out so well, and tell Susan that I'm fighting a good fight against both Huns and cooties."
      "Mrs. Dr. dear," whispered Susan solemnly, "what are cooties?"
      Mrs. Blythe whispered back and then said in reply to Susan's horrified ejaculations, "It's always...1921, L. M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside
  2. (Australia, Canada, US, childish, colloquial, plural-normally) 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.
  3. (rare) A nest-building female American coot (counterpart to cooter).
  4. (rare, slang) A sideswiper, a type of telegraph key.

Questions about cooties

What is cooties the plural of?
Cooties is the plural of cootie.
How do you pronounce cooties?
Cooties is pronounced /ˈkuːtiz/.

Words near cooties in the dictionary

  1. cooth
  2. cootie
  3. Cootie Brown
  4. cootie catcher
  5. cootie catchers
  6. cooties
  7. cootikins
  8. cootling
  9. cootlings
  10. Cootralantra
  11. coots

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cooties (page history and authors); cootie (page history and authors). 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.

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