Other forms: mosquitoes, mosquitos
A mosquito is a small flying insect that bites and drinks blood. A mosquito bite, mosquito net, mosquito repellent.
Only the females bite, and they need the blood protein to make eggs. Mosquitoes carry malaria, dengue and several other diseases and are by a wide margin the deadliest animal to humans — hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. The plural is mosquitoes or mosquitos. Note mosquito net, which is among the most cost-effective public health interventions there is; and that the whine is the wingbeat at about six hundred beats a second.
1nounmosquitoA small flying insect that bites and drinks blood.
“A mosquito kept buzzing around my ear all night.”
mosquito is an insect.
Spanish mosquito means little fly, a diminutive of mosca, from Latin musca. Every European name for the insect is some version of small fly, which considerably understates it.
Proto-Indo-European
*mūs- — fly, stinging fly, gnat
Latin
musca — fly
Spanish
mosquito — gnat
English, today
mosquito
Built from
Spanish mosquito (“gnat”), diminutive of mosca (“fly”), from Latin musca (“fly”), from Proto-Indo-European mūs- (“fly, stinging fly, gnat”). Cognate with vls meuzie (“mosquito”), dialectal Swedish mausa (“fly”), Lithuanian musė (“a fly”) and Sicilian muschitta (“midge”). See also midge. 1580s.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA