cute

Etymology

Aphetic form of acute, originally “keenly perceptive or discerning, shrewd” (1731). Meaning transferred to “pretty, fetching” by US students (slang) c.1834. Meaning drifted further to describe the pleasing attraction to features usually possessed by the young.

adj

1. Possessing physical features, behaviors, personality traits or other properties that are mainly attributed to infants and small or cuddly animals; e.g. fair, dainty, round, and soft physical features, disproportionately large eyes and head, playfulness, fragility, helplessness, curiosity or shyness, innocence, affectionate behavior.
   Our reaction to cute attributes is understood as the way nature ensures mammals care for their young.
2. Lovable, charming, attractive or pleasing, especially in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way.
   Let's go to the mall and look for cute girls.
3. Sexually attractive or pleasing; gorgeous.
   He's got such cute buns.
   I ordered her to strip for me and made her wiggle her cute little ass as she took off her panties. 2010, Vernon J. Geberth, Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation, page 116
4. Affected or contrived to charm; mincingly clever; precious; cutesy.
   The actor's performance was too cute for me. All that mugging to the audience killed the humor.
   Don't get cute with me, boy!
   "This time we aren't interested in anything cute or cryptic. We want the truth." May 1957, William P. McGivern, Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Magazine, page 102, column 2
5. Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute)
   Then Turpin being so very cute, He hid his money in his boot. ca. 1850. Anonymous, "Turpin Hero" (broadside ballad, probably originally dating to 18th century)
   Cute trick, but can you do it consistently?
6. (especially mathematics) Evincing cleverness; surprising in its elegance or unconventionality (but of limited importance).
   There's a cute alternative proof of this using lambda calculus.
   Cute solution to pin one Knight by unpinning the other and so force discovered guard for the Bishop: it took me hours to find that Bishop key. 1963, The Tablet, volume 217
   We state a cute result that can be derived from our calcuations. It is not applied anywhere later, but shows that graphs with heavy tails and large clustering coefficients have large cores. 2012, “Vertex neighborhoods, low conductance cuts, and good seeds for local community methods”, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining