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cute hoor

cute HOOR — 'hoor' rhymes with 'poor'nounColloquial

A Hiberno-English slang term. Browse all Irish slang.

What it means

  1. A sly operator who works the system and stays just inside the rules — classically a local politician, publican or developer. 'Cute' here means cunning, not adorable.

In use

  • He got the site rezoned before anyone copped on. Cute hoor.

    Note: The tone is half disapproval, half admiration, which is the whole point of the phrase.

  • There's a cute hoor in every parish.

Where it comes from

'Cute' is the older English sense of acute, meaning shrewd, which Hiberno-English preserved. 'Hoor' is the Irish pronunciation of whore, used here as a general term for a man rather than with any sexual sense. The phrase became fixed political vocabulary in the twentieth century — 'cute hoorism' is a recognised charge in Irish public life.