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
Have I played the coquet with you, Juancho?
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 by Various
She laugh and make the mock at him, and play coquet with the others before his face.
From Roger Ingleton, Minor by Talbot Baines Reed
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
The lover continues his doleful lamenting, which is at last interrupted by the entrance of the May Queen herself, who chides him for his complaints and argues her right to coquet on such a day.
From The Standard Cantatas Their Stories, Their Music, and Their Composers by George P. (George Putnam) Upton
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
She should have remembered he was not to be coquetted with.
From Dreamers of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill
It was evident that Terence had coquetted with them merely to study their plans.
From My Lords of Strogue, Vol. I (of III) A Chronicle of Ireland, from the Convention to the Union by Lewis Wingfield
The idle wits frequented the public walks, coquetted, and made madrigals.
From Priests, Women, and Families by Jules Michelet
Much of what my grandfather had told me of the first Pretender was repeated, save that as the first had made alliance with the Mohammedans, so the second coquetted with the Christians.
From Dreamers of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill
Emmie sang two more songs, Julia laughing and coquetting with Ethan over prelude and interlude; and then Julia played a nocturne.
From The Open Question a tale of two temperaments by Elizabeth Robins
He was exactly fitted to hew his way to the Presidency, and he would have done so infallibly if he had not made the mistake of coquetting with slavery.
From Abraham Lincoln, Volume 2 (of 2) The True Story of a Great Life by William H. Herndon
The conjurer twists first one, then two, butterflies out of a bit of white paper, and, by means of a fan, causes them to fly and poise as if they were coquetting with July breezes.
From From the Oak to the Olive A Plain record of a Pleasant Journey by Julia Ward Howe
It appears in the tender and so infinitely sad lines which he wrote in prison, and likewise in the Confessions, a vain, exaggeratedly candid and coquetting portrait in prose.
From Paul Verlaine by Stefan Zweig
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
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