cocker

Word family

• cocker spaniel
  nounC1

Synonym discussion

Sense: verb/1

All five describe giving someone more comfort or attention than is good for them, but they differ in tone and frequency. 'Cocker' is the rarest and feels old-fashioned or literary; you mostly meet it in nineteenth-century novels. 'Pamper' is gentle and often neutral or positive — you can pamper yourself with a hot bath. 'Spoil' is the most common everyday verb and usually warns that the person's character is being damaged: a spoilt child throws tantrums. 'Indulge' simply means to let someone have what they want, sometimes just once. 'Coddle' suggests overprotecting someone from any difficulty, like packing extra blankets for a healthy adult. So you might say, 'Don't spoil the baby,' but a Victorian writer would say, 'The young heir was cockered by his nurses.'

Common collocations

Etymology

The noun goes back to the early 1800s and is short for 'cocker spaniel', a dog originally bred in England to flush and retrieve woodcocks — small game birds — for hunters. The verb 'cocker', meaning to pamper, is older and unrelated in origin; it appeared in Middle English in the 1400s, possibly from a now-lost word meaning to fondle or dandle a child. Although the two words look identical today, they came together by coincidence rather than by sharing a root.