Hear me out, this wasn’t my idea. I’m blaming this on Leroy. We have this little parody song we use on the air that mentions the word coochie. Well that led to Leroy asking if we ever wondered about the origins of the word coochie.
Well Leroy, challenge accepted. I’m a little concerned that I may get an email from IT asking why there are so many “coochie searches” on my computer. Guess I need to come up with a good response. At this point, I got nothing!
There's more than one way to spell it
According Wikipedia, you can spell it either: coochie, coochee, coochi, kootchy, kootchey, kootchie, koochy, koochey, cootchy, cootchey, cootchie, coochy, and coochey. Personally, I like coochie so I’m going to go with that.
Define coochie
According to Dictionary.com, coochie is defined as Slang: Vulgar. a vagina or, more broadly, a woman’s crotch area. Why vulgar is in there I don’t know.
Coochie and belly dancing in the United States
Taken from Geek Slop’s The Hoochie Coochie Dance takes the United States by storm (1890’s)
In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition (or the “Chicago World’s Fair”) was held in Chicago, Illinois.
The fair had a profound impact on architecture and the arts. It was at the Chicago World’s Fair, the world was introduced to the first Ferris Wheel (designed by George Ferris), Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, neon lights, Juicy Fruit gum, the hamburger, postcards, Hershey’s chocolate, the zipper, and a popular belly dancer, “Little Egypt” who performed on the mock streets of Cairo during the five-month long fair.
At the Chicago World’s Fair, Sol Bloom (the infamous entertainment producer) directed a show call “The Algerian Dancers of Morocco” at the fair attraction called “A Street in Cairo”. The show featured a Syrian dancer named Spyropoulos, or “Little Egypt” as she came to be known on stage.
Sypropoulos’s provocative dance was a huge hit at the fair. Customers, particularly men, lined up to see her dance the “hoochie coochie” or “shimmy and shake” dance.
After Sypropoulos’ Hoochie Coochie performance at the Chicago World’s Fair, several other women dancers adopted the name of Little Egypt and toured the United States performing some variation of the Hoochie Coochie dance, until the name Hoochie Coochie became synonymous with exotic dancers.
The Hoochie Coochie dance craze continued through the early 1900’s and slowly faded into history as even more erotic forms of dance (e.g. striptease) took center stage.
Note: There is no official spelling of “Hoochie Coochie”. Newspapers in the day spelled the dance in a wide variety of manners. Other spellings of Hoochie Coochie include hoochy coochy and hutchi cutchi.
The roots of coochie
There are several possible origins of the word coochie, and here are some that I found.
* The slang term ‘coochie’ is likely to be derived from the German word ‘Kuchen’, meaning ‘a pie or cake’.
* Another possible root is the Central American and Caribbean Spanish chocha, possibly derived from the Mexican panocha.
* Yet another explanation attributes it to the French word coucher, meaning to lie down.
There were families with the actual last name Coochie
The Coochie family name was found in the USA between 1880 and 1920. The most Coochie families were found in USA in 1880. In 1880 there were 8 Coochie families living in Vermont. This was 100% of all the recorded Coochie’s in the USA. (From Ancestry)
