Noun

1. A raccoon.

   1963 North, Sterling Rascal, Avon Books (softcover), p 100:

   • "How about a ham sandwich for you and your 'coon?"

2. A black person.
3. A person who is a member of a colourfully dressed dancing troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.
4. A coonass.

Usage notes

Verb

1. To hunt racoons.
2. To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.
   • 1923+, author title and volume kept strictly confidential by Google Books, Outing, W. B. Holland

     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.

   • 1957, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, volume XVI, Arkansas Historical Association

     2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie.

   • 1982, Edwin Van Syckle, The River Pioneers, Early Days on Grays Harbor, Pacific Search Press, page 186

     “Advertising” was one problem for frontier women. Another was having to “coon” across a fallen tree that had been felled and limbed to bridge a canyon or gully.

3. To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.
4. For an African American, to play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.
   • 1994, Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, page 234

     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.

   • 1999, Nelson George, Elevating the Game, Black Men and Basketball, U of Nebraska Press, ISBN 0803270852, page 52

     If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning.

   • 2005, Kermit Ernest Campbell, “gettin’ our groove on”, rhetoric, language, and literacy for the hip hop generation, Wayne State University Press, ISBN 081432925X, page 80

     From the classic toasts to the dirty dozens to the early blues⁵⁰ and now to gangsta rap lyrics—why not consider it all just a bunch of niggers cooning for the white man’s delight and dollars?

   • 2006, A. Khaulid, The Great Book of Fire, Damon Hunter, ISBN 1427602417, page 142

     Then the warrior appeared, in a manner that was dead serious as a heart attack wearing a baseball cap. Then came the sidekick, a jet black madman dancing, and almost cooning out of the shadows that cancelled him.

5. To steal.
   • 1940, John W. “Jack” Ganzhorn, I’ve Killed Men, Robert Hale Limited, page 58

     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.

   • 1948, John Donald Kingsley, The Antioch Review, volume VIII

     He kept on buying and selling horses, he said, sometimes paying for them in bogus, and sometimes cooning them. It was true he helped Malcolm Burnham break into Fred Able’s store

   • 1968, Bill Adler (compiler), Jay David (editor), Growing Up Black, Morrow, page 200

     In the summertime, at night, in addition to all the other things we did, some of us boys would slip out down the road, or across the pastures and go “cooning” watermelons.

   • 2006, Timothy M. Gay, Tris Speaker, The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend, U of Nebraska Press, ISBN 0803222068, page 37

     Tris and his gang loved to prowl around at night, “cooning melons,” as Speaker put it in a 1920 interview. By all accounts, young Master Speaker was a handful.