Cooties
fictional communicable disease
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 (such as Humans vs. Zombies). It is similar to the British "dreaded lurgi", and to terms used in the Nordic countries, in Italy, India and Iraq. A child is said to "catch" cooties through close contact with an "infected" person or from an opposite-sex child of a similar age.
Origin
The word is thought to originate from the Austronesian language family, in which the Philippine, Malaysian-Indonesian, and Māori languages have the word kuto or kutu for a parasitic biting insect. However, it is equally likely the name originated from "cuties", a cynical reference to the same. The earliest recorded uses of the term in English are by British soldiers during the First World War to refer to lice that proliferated in battlefield trenches.
A hand-held game, the Cootie Game, was made by the Irvin-Smith Company of Chicago in 1915; it involved tilting capsules (the cooties) into a trap over a background illustration depicting a battlefield. Other cootie games followed, all involving some form of "bug" or "cootie", until The Game of Cootie was launched in 1948 by Schaper Toys.
The public source identifies “Cooties” as fictional communicable disease. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cooties, fictional and communicable.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Cooties”, the useful work is to connect “fictional communicable disease” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3847695. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1915 and 1948.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cooties” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.