meet cute
UK/ˈmiːt ˌkjuːt/US/ˈmit ˌkjuːt/
meet cute noun: a situation in a film, television series, etc., in which a potential romantic couple meet for the first time in a way that is considered adorable, amusing, or cute.
Noun
meet cute (plural meet cutes)
- A situation in a film, television series, etc., in which a potential romantic couple meet for the first time in a way that is considered adorable, amusing, or cute.
- If this is a distortion of reality, it is a knowingly utopian gesture, and the wit of such conceits lies in placing in tension the ideal with the real and so being more than a series of fancy ‘meet cutes’: […]1989, Bruce Babington, Peter William Evans, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes, Manchester; New York, N.Y.: Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 11
- The hunt for love saturates Western culture. […] Romantic comedies have characters discover one another serendipitously, called "meet-cutes." The lead clumsily spills a drink on his future love interest, setting off a chain of events to love. Meet-cutes affirm the idea that possibility is all...2013, Jaime Woo, “How to Find Love on Grindr (if You Hafta)”, in Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect, Canada: [Lulu.com], →ISBN, page 108, column 1
- Synonyms:
- cute meet
- Any such situation occurring in real life between a pair of people who are not yet acquainted, romantically or otherwise.
- A short meet-cute dialogue ensues, detailing exactly how many hours of interviews [Steven] Levitt had agreed to (two), and exactly how much of his time [Stephen] Dubner actually ended up taking (three days).2015 May 15, Steven D[avid] Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, “Freakonomics 10 years on: Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt on what they got right and wrong”, in The Guardian, London, archived from the...
Verb
meet cute (third-person singular simple present meets cute, present participle meeting cute, simple past and past participle met cute)
- Of characters in a story or people in real life: to meet each other in an adorable, amusing, or cute way.
- "The rest of the script is fine, boys," said Mr. Trumpett. "You've got nice situations and I like the way you've handled your story line and I like your finish—we're going to have a nice little picture when we get through with it—but, frankly, I don't like your beginning. They don't meet cute."1937 May 22, Alan Campbell, “They Meet Cute”, in The New Yorker, volume 13, number 14, New York, N.Y.: New Yorker Magazine, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 37, column 1
- "Perhaps they don't meet cute enough," Mae said. You could not get away from the studio jargon. "Meeting cute" meant roughly that our hero did something like stepping on a banana peel, losing his balance and sliding on his behind up to the girl, though of course there were infinite variations.1943, John P[hillips] Marquand, “Well, Hardly That”, in So Little Time, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, pages 287–288
Examples of meet cute in a sentence
- If you were to write a romcom featuring a meet cute, you’d set it there.2021 December 26, Alys Fowler, “My winter of love: I was homesick in New York. The quiet Danish poet was just what I was longing for”, in...
- Yes, Robert Downey Jr. dies so that Wesley Snipes and Nastassja Kinski can meet cute (as screenwriters like to say) in Mike Figgis's One Night Stand.1997 November 25, Robert Hofler, “Film: Love and Death”, in The Advocate, number 747, Los Angeles, Calif.: Liberation Publications, →ISSN...
- Midge and Augie meet cute at the diner, but their relationship blooms while they’re in their respective rental cabins.2023 June 15, Manohla Dargis, “‘Asteroid City’ Review: Our Town and Country”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on...
Synonyms of meet cute
Forms of meet cute
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | meet cutes |
| alternative form | meet-cute |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | meets cute |
| present participle | meeting cute |
| past participle | met cute |
| past | met cute |
| alternative form | cute-meet |
Origin of meet cute
Accidentally coined by German-American film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947), who had difficulty speaking English, to describe the encounter between the characters played by Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper in the 1938 film Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
Questions about meet cute
- What does meet cute mean?
- Meet cute means a situation in a film, television series, etc., in which a potential romantic couple meet for the first time in a way that is considered adorable, amusing, or cute.
- How do you use meet cute in a sentence?
- If you were to write a romcom featuring a meet cute, you’d set it there.
- What part of speech is meet cute?
- Meet cute can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce meet cute?
- Meet cute is pronounced /ˈmiːt ˌkjuːt/ (UK).
- What is the plural of meet cute?
- The plural of meet cute is meet cutes.
Words near meet cute in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: meet cute (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-meet cute.ogg.
Cite this entry: “meet cute.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meet_cute. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.