No ens acoquinem #Psicolabis #Etimologia .

Acoquinar s'escriu amb 'o', tot i que un catalanoparlant central pot tenir la temptació d'escriure acuquinar fent-ho derivar de cuca...

Acoquinar vol dir acollonir-se i, per tant, ja lliga amb un cert sentit figurat (o real!) de sentir que la cuca esdevé de minúscules dimensions.

Però no: acoquinar ve de coquí / coquina, i sembla que de cuiner:

coquí -ina: potser del ll. coquinus, -a, -um 'relatiu a la cuina', der. de coquus 'cuiner', que degué significar 'noi de cuina', amb fama de lladre, o potser del fr. coquin 'pillet'

adj desp
1 Dit de la persona gasiva, avara.
2 Dit del covard, del qui és capaç de trair.

En castellar es diu igual i en anglès seria scare: To become frightened, a child who scares easily (Middle English skerren, scaren, from Old Norse skirra, from skjarr, timid). Però en anglès també hi h altres mots per a l'acolloniment:

• afraid [Middle English affraied, past participle of affraien, to frighten, from Old French esfraier, esfreer, to disturb, of Germanic origin.]
• frighten
• fear [Middle English fer, from Old English fǣr, danger, sudden calamity.]

Curiosament, tots tenen una 'f' o una 'c' sovint combinada amb 's', que són maneres onomatopeiques de mostrar rebuig o lletjor. 

• Les efes indiquen llunyania, rebuig, lletjor (fuig, fàstic, feo, far) o eteri (fum, foc, foll), i por (afraid, fright, fear).
• Les ces (amb el so de k) indiquen angles, tancament, dolor, però també rebuig o por (ecs, asco, scare).

WORD HISTORY   Old English fǣr, the ancestor of our word fear, meant "calamity, disaster," but not the emotion engendered by such an event. This is in line with the meaning of the prehistoric Common Germanic word *fēraz, "danger," which is the source of words with similar senses in other Germanic languages, such as Old Saxon and Old High German fār, "ambush, danger," and Old Icelandic fār, "treachery, damage." Scholars have determined the form and meaning of Germanic *fēraz by working backward from the forms and the meanings of its descendants. The most important cause of the change of meaning in the word fear was probably the existence in Old English of the related verb fǣran, which meant "to terrify, take by surprise." Fear is first recorded in Middle English with the sense "emotion of fear" in a work composed around 1290.