"Coquette" vs. "flirt" [closed]

Solution 1:

No, they are not synonymous. A coquette is an insincere flirt, it has an implication of deliberate manipulation, and malicious intent. "Tease" might be close to a synonym. Whereas flirting doesn't carry that connotation at all. To put it another way, all coquettes are flirts, but not all flirts are coquettes.

If a woman is flirting with the deliberate intent of initiating a romantic encounter, she would not be a coquette. If she was doing so, simply to make the man think she was even though she never intended to engage in such an encounter, she would be a coquette.

BTW, I understand that men are teases too, but coquette always refers to a female, because of its form. I in no way intend to imply a sexist implication. Of course if you remove the feminine ending "ette" from the word coquette, you certainly get something referring to a man :-)

Solution 2:

The dictionary seems to make little distinction between the two terms. However, they do appear to be used differently sometimes. For instance, in Henry James' "Daisy Miller: A Study", Winterbourne makes a distinction between the two in Chapter I:

"But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt."

James seems to use coquette much in the way Fraser Orr defines it above.