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cuckoo

nounverbadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkʊkuː//
  • United Kingdom//ˈkɵkʉw//
  • United States//ˈkuku//
  • Scotland//ˈkʉkʉ//

Any of various birds, of the family Cuculidae within the order Cuculiformes, famous for laying its eggs in the nests of other species; but especially a common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), that has a characteristic two-note call.

noun

  1. 1

    Any of various birds, of the family Cuculidae within the order Cuculiformes, famous for laying its eggs in the nests of other species; but especially a common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), that has a characteristic two-note call.

    He knows me, as the blind man knows the cuckoo, By the bad voice.

  2. 2

    The sound of that particular bird.

  3. 3

    The bird-shaped figure found in cuckoo clocks.

  4. 4

    The cuckoo clock itself.

  5. 5

    A person who inveigles themselves into a place where they should not be (used especially in the phrase a cuckoo in the nest).

  6. 6

    slangSomeone who is crazy.

  7. 7

    Variant of coo-cooAlternative form of coo-coo (Barbadian food).

  8. 8

    Variant of ku ku jiaoAlternative form of ku ku jiao (the penis)

Etymology

From Middle English cokkou, kokkow, cukkuk, gokkouȝ, probably from Old French cocu, coquu, cucu (whence French coucou); ultimately onomatopoeic of the song of the male Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), perhaps via Latin cucūlus (“cuckoo”). Compare dialectal English gowkoo (“cuckoo”). Displaced Middle English gnokken (“cuckoo”) and native Middle English yeke, ȝek (from Old English ġēac (“cuckoo”)), see English gowk. The UK sense is by analogy from the bird's practice of brood parasitism. The Malaysian and Singaporean sense is a calque of Hokkien 咕咕鳥 /咕咕鸟 (ku-kú-chiáu)

verb

  1. 1

    To make the call of a cuckoo.

    Switzerland is the home of many musical toys and here were carved whistles in the shapes of birds. These cuckooed realistically when blown into, with the beak opening and shutting, and the tail moving up and down to produce the 'cuck' and the 'oooh'.

  2. 2

    To repeat something incessantly.

  3. 3

    To take over the home of a vulnerable person for the purposes of carrying out organized crime in a concealed way.

    She'll have been cuckooed. That'll be the Knezevics. They can't launder fast enough, so what do you do with it? Where do you put it? You hide it in somebody else's place; somebody who han't got a clue what's going on and couldn't do a fat lot about it if they did.

adjective

  1. 1

    slangCrazy; not sane.

    I think I'm going cuckoo!

    71...R/3xN†? [White] resigns?? Lengyel combined to get this cuckoo coup expecting 72 RxR BxP† to win. And Darga's mind, apparently in the same channel, also overlooked 73 K-K3.

Forms

plural
cuckoos
comparative
more cuckoo
superlative
most cuckoo
past tense
cuckooed
past participle
cuckooed
present participle
cuckooing
third person singular
cuckoos
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).