Word.ws English Dictionary

coquettery

coquettery is the alternative spelling of coquetry.

Meaning of coquetry

Noun

coquetry (countable and uncountable, plural coquetries)

  1. Coquettish behaviour; actions designed to excite erotic attention, without intending to reciprocate such feelings (chiefly of women towards men); flirtatious teasing.
    • With a lover […] her sensibility will naturally lead her to endeavour to excite emotion, not to gratify her vanity, but her heart. This I do not allow to be coquetry, it is the artless impulse of nature […]1791 (date written), Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], published 1792, →OCLC
  2. (countable) An act constituting such behaviour; an affectation of amorous interest or enticement, especially of a woman directed towards a man.
    • The little coquetries, which are as natural to a gay young girl as her laughter, were all in full play, and had she gone no further no harm would have been done.1882, Louisa M. Alcott, Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories

Questions about coquettery

What is coquettery the alternative spelling of?
Coquettery is the alternative spelling of coquetry.

Words near coquettery in the dictionary

  1. coquets
  2. coquette
  3. coquetted
  4. coquetter
  5. coquetters
  6. coquettery
  7. coquettes
  8. coquetting
  9. coquettings
  10. coquettish
  11. coquettishly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coquettery (page history and authors); coquetry (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: “coquettery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/coquettery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.