definitions

cooter

[ koo-ter ]
/ ˈku tər /
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SEE MORE SYNONYMS FOR cooter ON THESAURUS.COM

noun

Chiefly Southern U.S. any of several large aquatic turtles of the southern U.S. and northern Mexico.

RELATED WORDS

tortoise, slowpoke, chelonian, snapper, terrapin, leatherback, loggerhead, testudinal

Nearby words

coorie, coos, coos bay, coot, cootch, cooter, cootie, cooties, cooty, coover, cooze

Origin of cooter

1820–30; said to be < Bambara, Malinke kuta turtle (with related forms in other Niger-Congo languages); compare coot to copulate (of sea turtles), first attested in the Caribbean in 1667
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2019

Examples from the Web for cooter

  • Democrats have only the dude who played “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazard to crow about.

    Hollywood's Dirty Secret|John Avlon|May 14, 2009|DAILY BEAST

  • The cooter is the terrapin, and a very expert boatman he is.

    Letters of a Traveller|William Cullen Bryant

  • A “cooter” is a box-tortoise, and the noun is turned into a verb with an ease characteristic of the mountaineers.

    Our Southern Highlanders|Horace Kephart

Word Origin and History for cooter

cooter

n.

name for some types of freshwater terrapin in southern U.S., 1835 (first attested 1827 in phrase drunk as a cooter, but this probably is a colloquial form of unrelated coot), from obsolete verb coot "to copulate" (1660s), of unknown origin. The turtle is said to copulate for two weeks at a stretch.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper