Daintily attractive. The word “cute” dates from the seventeenth century. It was originally an abbreviation of acute and had the same meaning: clever, shrewd, ingenious. In America, however, it came to be applied to attractive persons or things, those with an appearance of dainty charm rather than outright beauty. A button is small and round; so are some cute objects. For some reason this simile took hold in the early twentieth century. The synonym cute as a bug’s ear similarly alludes to something very small—and in fact nonexistent (bugs don’t have ears).