verb
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to behave flirtatiously
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to dally or trifle
Etymology
Origin of coquet
1685–95; < French; literally, cockerel, equivalent to coq cock + -et -et
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
A: I'm afraid I was a bit of a coquet in my youth, but now that I'm a grandmother with an 18-year-old granddaughter, I'm simplifying what I wear.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 1, 2010
His Letters shew him to have lived in a continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary coquet.
From Lectures on the English Poets Delivered at the Surrey Institution by Alfred Rayney Waller
It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean.
From Hastings and Neighbourhood by Walter Higgins
Have I played the coquet with you, Juancho?
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 by Various
You will say, I am a coquet even in friendship; and I am not quite sure you are not in the right.
From The History of Emily Montague by Frances Brooke
Madame coquetted with him in the most captivating and naive manner, with eyes, gestures, and a profusion of compliments, till the Colonel’s old head felt thirty years younger on his padded shoulders.
From "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin
Becker, indeed, once coquetted with the thought of patronising him; but the project had no sequel, and it stands alone.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson
They doubtless still coquetted with a certain sentimentality, but it seemed to me that with true sorrow true feeling had also vanished.
From A Twofold Life by Wilhelmine von Hillern
And as he spoke he smiled and coquetted with the portrait, as though to say, "Don't mind my saying all this to your face."
From The Fortunes Of Glencore by Charles James Lever
As usual, the most distinguished ladies coquetted with him, and displayed all the magnificence and all the charms which the luxury of a great and brilliant court can bestow upon women.
From A Twofold Life by Wilhelmine von Hillern
Remember, no vagaries, no irregularities, no coquetting with the ‘one time that never hurts one.’
From The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker A Novel by John Strange Winter
The goldfinches swept by overhead with a gleam of colour from their wings, coquetting on their way to the apple-trees.
From Greene Ferne Farm by Richard Jefferies
With Heine, too, who at that time was coquetting with Communism, he carried on a sprightly and not unfruitful intercourse.
From The life and teaching of Karl Marx by M. Beer
Somebody has accused me of coquetting with history.
From Famous Prima Donnas by Lewis Clinton Strang
Footnote 17: A coquetting with virtue as a virtuoso, of course Gaspard means.
From Titan: A Romance Vol. II (of 2) by Jean Paul
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
