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. 2018

Related Words for cooter

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

Examples from the Web for cooter

Contemporary Examples of 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

Historical Examples of cooter

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.