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
I am not quite the heartless coquet I seem.
From Flora Lyndsay or, Passages in an Eventful Life by Susanna Moodie
In the last century there lived a man who, in his young days, was a desperate coquet.
From Indian Story and Song from North America by Alice C. (Alice Cunningham) Fletcher
Love iz a lighted kandel, and coquets fly around it, just az a miller duz, till by-and-by they dive into it, and then what a burnt coquet and miller we hav.
From The Complete Works of Josh Billings by Henry W. Shaw
His wings moved so slowly he seemed to fly without pressure on the air—as slowly as a lady fans herself when there is no one to coquet with.
From Bevis The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies
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
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
I don't believe that Helen Rankine coquetted with you.
From Eleven Possible Cases by Franklin Fyles
She should have remembered he was not to be coquetted with.
From Dreamers of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill
It was great fun," he says; "no one can have an idea how Moscheles and I coquetted together on the piano—how the one constantly imitated the other, and how sweet we were.
From Fragments of an Autobiography by Felix Moscheles
Otherwise his career had been much like other careers, denouncing, or coquetting and even pressing for office, equable in expectation, and vindictive if refused.
From Lord Chatham His Early Life and Connections by Archibald Phillip Primrose Rosebery
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
They fancied that M. Thiers was coquetting with the émeute, that the petit bourgeois, as he hypocritically called himself, wanted to cozen the monarchists, and, using Paris as his lever, overthrow them.
From History of the Commune of 1871 by P. Lissagary
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
But strange to say, in 1830 we find Francis actually coquetting with revolution.
From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 8 "France" to "Francis Joseph I." by Various
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.
