cute vs pretty

cute

adj
  • Lovable, charming, attractive or pleasing, especially in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way. 

  • Evincing cleverness; surprising in its elegance or unconventionality (but of limited importance). 

  • Mentally keen or discerning (See also acute) 

  • Possessing physical features, behaviors, personality traits or other properties that are mainly attributed to infants and small or cuddly animals; e.g. fair, dainty, round, and soft physical features, disproportionately large eyes and head, playfulness, fragility, helplessness, curiosity or shyness, innocence, affectionate behavior. 

  • Sexually attractive or pleasing; gorgeous. 

  • Affected or contrived to charm; mincingly clever; precious; cutesy. 

pretty

adj
  • Fine-looking; only superficially attractive; initially appealing but having little substance; see petty. 

  • Cunning; clever, skilful. 

  • Of objects or things: nice-looking, appealing. 

  • Pleasant to the sight or other senses; attractive, especially of women or children. 

  • Awkward, unpleasant. 

adv
  • Somewhat, fairly, quite; sometimes also (by meiosis) very. 

  • Prettily, in a pretty manner. 

noun
  • Something that is pretty. 

  • A pretty person; a term of address to a pretty person. 

verb
  • To make pretty; to beautify 

How often have the words cute and pretty occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )