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coon

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coon¹

  • /kun/ US
  • /kuːn/ UK

Rhymes with -uːn

Where it comes from

Clipping of raccoon.

noun coons

  1. derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur A black person. And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room?
  2. Southern US, informal A raccoon. 1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter IX. "The Sea and the Desert", page 187. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels.
  3. derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur A black race traitor.

    Similar: Oreo, Uncle Tom

  4. South Africa, informal A member of a colorfully dressed dance troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.
  5. Southern US, ethnic, slur A coonass; a white Acadian French person who lives in the swamps.
  6. US, dated A sly fellow.
  7. A black person who "plays the coon"; that is, who plays the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians. This is especially true when your audience has such high expectations of your playing the coon, and thus providing symbolic assurance that a darker people are contained in their assigned social "place" as "subpersons."

verb coons · cooning · cooned

  1. Southern US, colloquial To hunt raccoons.
  2. To traverse by crawling, as a ledge.
  3. Southern US, colloquial To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek. There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair.
  4. Georgia, colloquial To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.
  5. of an African American To play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians. Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters.
  6. Southern US, colloquial, dated To steal. Cooning water-melons [sic.] was a common custom, and young people would go out at night on such parties. To prevent any raids on our melon patch Grandfather set a trap alarm—which brought disaster.

Coon²

proper noun Coons

  1. A surname.

Thesaurus

Closest in meaning: nigra, spade, ringtail, common raccoon, common racoon, procyon lotor, sanders, raccoon, rabbit, coonhound, racoon, possum, opossum, skunk, squirrel, negro

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MLA

"coon." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/coon. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026.

APA

coon. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/coon

Chicago

"coon." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/coon.

BibTeX
@misc{coon_2026,
  title = {coon},
  howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://micwyn.com/word/coon},
  urldate = {2026-11-06}
}