Note: This word has at times been seen as a borrowing from Malay kutu "any of various parasitic biting insects," or a cognate form in another Austronesian language, with the ending conformed to -ie. (See forms under "louse" in R. Blust and S. Trussel, The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary, online.) The earliest records of coot and cootie "body louse," and cooty "infested with lice" are in letters and journals of British soldiers, or Americans in British service, in the trenches of Belgium and France. The American Harold Chapin, fighting in the British Army, used cooty and coot in letters written in April and September, 1915, prior to his death in the Battle of Loos on September 26. By 1917 the word was in general use among British and American soldiers. There is no indication in any of the early records of a connection with Southeast Asia or Oceania, which might be the case if coot(y) was a loanword from that region. Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, suggests that the adjective cooty "infested with lice," may have been the basis for the other forms, and alludes to the bird coot, which was reputed to have been heavily infested with parasites; compare the expression "as lousy as a coot," attested regionally in England since ca. 1864.