What Does Cooties Mean?

Cooties is a fictitious childhood disease, commonly represented as childlore. It is used in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines as a rejection term and an infection tag game.

What is cooties slang for?

As a nickname for body lice or head lice, cooties first appeared in trenches slang in 1915. ... The phrase “going cooty” meant getting lice and being quarantined for de-lousing. Later, the word “cooties,” came to be used loosely (and often humorously) to mean imaginary germs or bugs.

Is Cooties a bad word?

American children, however, have been using the word for several generations. The original cooties were very real and extremely nasty, since the word was first applied to body lice. It's a slang term intimately (and I mean that sincerely) associated with the military in World War One.