Other forms: masks, masked, masking
A mask is something worn over the face — for disguise, for carnival, for protection, or for medicine. A carnival mask, a face mask, an oxygen mask, a diving mask.
The protective sense has become the most used of all, and it is the one that changed fastest: face mask needed no explanation to anybody after 2020. The verb means to hide or cover something, and it is used far more figuratively than literally: mask the smell, mask her disappointment, mask a problem rather than fix it. In computing, to mask data is to obscure it deliberately. Note masked as an adjective — a masked man — and unmask, which means to reveal who somebody really is.
1nounmaskA covering worn over the face.
“He wore a mask so nobody would recognise him.”
2verbconcealTo hide or cover something.
“The music masked the noise from the road.”
3nouncosmeticA cosmetic treatment spread over the face.
“She put on a face mask and lay down for twenty minutes.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
mask is a face covering, or a way of hiding.
Medieval Latin masca meant a mask or a spectre, and the word may have come from a Germanic root for a net — the mesh a mask was made from. It travelled through Italian maschera into French and then English, gathering the theatre along the way.
Proto-West Germanic
*maskā
Medieval Latin
masca
Italian
maschera — mask, disguise
Middle French
masque — a covering to hide or protect the face
English, today
mask
Borrowed from Middle French masque (“a covering to hide or protect the face”), from Italian maschera (“mask, disguise”), from (a byform of, see it for more) Medieval Latin masca, mascha, a borrowing of Proto-West Germanic maskā, from which English a doublet of mesh and a doublet of are inherited. a doublet of mascara and masque and mesh. Replaced Old English grīma (“mask”), whence grime, and displaced non-native Middle English viser (“visor, mask”) borrowed from Old French viser, visier.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA