Meaning
A clever, shrewd or quick-witted person, especially one with practical sense rather than book learning ('She is a smart cookie - she will spot that hidden fee'). Informal and admiring or affectionate, never a slur; originally American, now widely used across varieties of English. Informal, warm and admiring; typically praise for streetwise or practical intelligence. Regional use: American English.
Origin
American mid-20th-century slang. It rests on 'cookie' as an early-20th-century American colloquialism for a person, which Etymonline dates to 1920; the same entry dates the figurative 'smart cookie', a clever or perceptive person, from 1948. The earliest quotation in Wiktionary is J. P. Donleavy's A Singular Man (1963), where the phrase appears in dialect spelling as 'smart cookee'. The cookie itself contributes affectionate ordinariness rather than intelligence - the adjective does the semantic work, exactly as in the parallel 'tough cookie' for an unyielding person, which grew out of the same person-sense of cookie. The term spread from American English into general informal English over the later 20th century. The gap between the dictionary dating (1948) and the earliest publicly collected citation (1963) is normal for slang of this kind and suggests mid-century currency in speech before print.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a real smart cookie
- one smart cookie
- quite a smart cookie
- smart little cookie
Usage Examples
- Ask Naomi to check the contract; she is a smart cookie and will spot the hidden clause.
- You untangled the whole schedule in ten minutes? You are one smart cookie.
- The boy is a smart cookie - he negotiated an extra hour of screen time before breakfast.