Other forms: mice
A mouse is the small grey animal with round ears, a pointed nose and a long thin tail. One scratching behind the skirting board at night, a trap baited with cheese, the cat sitting very still by the cupboard.
The plural is mice — two mice, three blind mice — and never mouses for the animal. The computer mouse is the thing under your hand that moves the pointer on the screen; for that one, both mice and mouses are heard. A mouse is also a person who is shy and says nothing: quiet as a mouse, a mouse in meetings. Mousy hair is dull light brown, and a mouse mat is the pad the device sits on. Do not mix a mouse up with a rat: the rat is much bigger, and calling someone a rat is an insult of a different kind.
1nounmouseA small grey or brown animal with a long thin tail, of the kind that lives in fields and gets into houses.~82%
“A mouse ran along the skirting board and vanished behind the stove.”
2noundeviceThe hand-held device you move on a desk to control the pointer on a screen.~16%
“Right-click with the mouse to open the menu.”
3nounshyA shy, quiet person who avoids attention.~2%
“He was a mouse at school and never once put his hand up.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Mouse has hardly moved in thousands of years. Its Germanic relatives are all the same handful of sounds — Dutch muis, German Maus, Old Norse mus, Old Frisian mus. Further out the pattern holds: Ancient Greek mys, Latin mus, Sanskrit mus. The animal has lived alongside people for so long that the word never needed replacing.
Middle English
mous
English, today
mouse
From Middle English mous. 2 Germanic cognates include Old Frisian mūs, Old Saxon mūs (German Low German Muus), Dutch muis, Old High German mūs (German Maus), Old Norse mús (Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish mus, Faroese and Icelandic mús).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA