Word.ws English Dictionary

fight cocum

fight cocum verb: to be wily and cautious.

Verb

fight cocum (third-person singular simple present fights cocum, present participle fighting cocum, simple past and past participle fought cocum)

  1. (obsolete, thieves' cant) To be wily and cautious.
    • So Tim didn't fight cocum enough, and was grabbed.1848, George William MacArthur Reynolds, Esther de Medina: Or, The Crimes of London, page 79
    • I have got the Yacks, so do not come it. Fight cocum.1859, Snowden's magistrates assistant, page 498

Forms of fight cocum

third-person singular presentfights cocum
present participlefighting cocum
past participlefought cocum
pastfought cocum

Origin of fight cocum

Hotten (see References) suggests that cocum might be related to the Scottish keek (“peep or pry”).

Questions about fight cocum

What does fight cocum mean?
Fight cocum means to be wily and cautious.
What part of speech is fight cocum?
Fight cocum is a verb.
What is the past tense of fight cocum?
The past tense of fight cocum is fought cocum.

Words near fight cocum in the dictionary

  1. fight a rearguard action
  2. fight back
  3. fight bite
  4. fight bites
  5. fight choreography
  6. fight cocum
  7. fight dirty
  8. fight down
  9. fight fire with fire
  10. fight fires
  11. fight for one's life

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fight cocum (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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