cooter

[koo-ter]

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.

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

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.