cu-teとは 意味・読み方・使い方

語源

Aphetic form of acute, originally meaning “keenly perceptive or discerning, shrewd” (1731). Meaning transferred to “pretty, fetching” by US students (slang) c. 1834. Meaning drifted further to describe the pleasing attraction to features usually possessed by the young.

発音

• IPA: /kjuːt/
• Homophone: Qt
• 韻: -uːt

形容詞

cute (comparative cuter, superlative cutest)

1. Possessing physical features, behaviors, personality traits or other properties that are mainly attributed to infants and small or cuddly animals; e.g. fair, dainty, round, and soft physical features, disproportionately large eyes and head, playfulness, fragility, helplessness, curiosity or shyness, innocence, affectionate behavior.

   Our reaction to cute attributes is understood as the way nature ensures mammals care for their young.

2. Lovable, charming, attractive or pleasing, especially in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way.

   Let's go to the mall and look for cute girls.

3. Sexually attractive or pleasing; gorgeous.

   He's got such cute buns.

   • 2010, Vernon J. Geberth, Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation, page 116:

     I ordered her to strip for me and made her wiggle her cute little ass as she took off her panties.

4. Affected or contrived to charm; mincingly clever; precious; cutesy.

   The actor's performance was too cute for me. All that mugging to the audience killed the humor.

   Don't get cute with me, boy!

   • 1957 May, William P. McGivern, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Magazine, page 102, column 2:

     "This time we aren't interested in anything cute or cryptic. We want the truth."

5. Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute)

   Synonyms: clever, shrewd

   • ca. 1850. Anonymous, "Turpin Hero" (broadside ballad, probably originally dating to 18th century)

     Then Turpin being so very cute,
     He hid his money in his boot.

   • 1908, Winston Churchill, Letter to his fianceé Clementine:

     'Filled with old doddering peers, cute financial magnates, clever wirepullers, big brewers with bulbous noses. All the enemies of progress are there — weaklings, sleek, slug, comfortable, self-important individuals.

   • 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:

     "The police are cute enough, of course, to choose either a Roman Catholic or a materialist as the magistrate."

   Cute trick, but can you do it consistently?

6. (especially mathematics) Evincing cleverness; surprising in its elegance or unconventionality (but of limited importance).

   There's a cute alternative proof of this using lambda calculus.

   • 1963, The Tablet‎, volume 217:

     Cute solution to pin one Knight by unpinning the other and so force discovered guard for the Bishop: it took me hours to find that Bishop key.

   • 2012, “Vertex neighborhoods, low conductance cuts, and good seeds for local community methods”, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining‎:

     We state a cute result that can be derived from our calcuations. It is not applied anywhere later, but shows that graphs with heavy tails and large clustering coefficients have large cores.

使用する際の注意点

All meanings except for the first one are less commonly found outside of North America.

同意語

• (having features mainly attributed to infants and small or cuddly animals): endearing
• (attractive or pleasing in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way): pretty

派生語

派生した語

• → Arabic: كْيُوت (kyūt), كِيُوت (kiyūt)
• → Danish: cute
• → Armenian: քյութ (kʻyutʻ)
• → Dutch: kjoet
• → Japanese: キュート (kyūto)
• → Vietnamese: cute