Cutie

How to spell cutie

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cutie

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cutie mean?

1. nounAn informal, affectionate name for an attractive or charmingly endearing person.

Cutie in a sentence

• The toddler grinned at the camera like a real cutie.

• She signed the birthday card to her partner with the word cutie.

Where does cutie come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is an affectionate noun built from the adjective 'cute' plus the diminutive ending '-ie', which English routinely adds to convey fondness or smallness, as in 'sweetie' and 'doggie'. The adjective 'cute' itself began life as a clipped, casual form of 'acute', which came from the Latin acutus, the past participle of acuere meaning 'to sharpen'. In the 1700s 'cute' carried the sense of 'sharp-witted' or 'clever', and the apostrophe that once marked the missing first syllable (as in 'cute) gradually dropped away. Over the 1800s the meaning drifted from mental sharpness toward 'dainty, charming, attractive', especially in American usage, and from there the noun 'cutie' emerged in the early twentieth century as a playful name for an endearing person. The spelling trap is the unstressed ending: it is 'cutie' with '-ie', not the verb-style '-y', because it follows the affectionate-noun pattern.

How the word is built

• cute (from acute, sharp/charming)
• -ie (affectionate noun suffix)