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musket

UK/ˈmʌskət/US/ˈmʌskət/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,386 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: muskets

A musket is a long-barrelled gun loaded down the muzzle. Shoulder a musket.

It took about twenty seconds to reload, which is why soldiers fought in lines and fired together. A musket was wildly inaccurate beyond fifty yards, and the volley rather than the aim did the work.

Pink Flojd · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of musket

  1. 1nounmusketA long-barrelled gun loaded down the muzzle.B2+

    “A trained soldier could fire a musket three times in a minute.”

musket is a weapon.

Where it comes from

The word came through French from Italian moschetto, a sparrowhawk, since early firearms were named after birds of prey.

  1. Latin

    musca

  2. roa-oit

    moschetto

  3. Middle French

    mousquet

  4. English, today

    musket

Built from

  • muskete · Middle English — sparrow hawk
  • mosca · Italian — fly

First attested around 1210 as a surname, and later in the 1400s as a word for the sparrowhawk (Middle English - forms: musket, muskett, muskete (“sparrow hawk”)), from Middle French mousquet, from roa-oit moschetto (a diminutive of mosca (“fly”), from Latin musca) used to refer initially to a sparrowhawk (given its small size or speckled appearance) and then a crossbow arrow. The name was subsequently adopted for a heavier, shoulder-fired version of an arquebus, adhering to a pattern of naming firearms and cannons after birds of prey and similar creatures (compare falcon, falconet), a sense which was also borrowed into French and then (around 1580) into English. Cognate to Spanish mosquete, Portuguese mosquete. Smoothbore firearms continued to be called muskets even as they switched from using matchlocks to flintlocks to percussion locks, but with the advent of rifled muskets, the word was finally displaced by rifle.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

musket in the wild

  • The Charleville musket was a.69 caliber standard French infantry musket used in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    Charleville musket

  • A rifled musket, rifle musket, or rifle-musket is a type of firearm made mid-19th century.

    Rifled musket

  • However, the most common weapon to be used by Northern and Southern soldiers was the rifled musket.

    List of weapons in the American Civil War

  • There were "first class" weapons like Springfield rifles, "second class" weapons like the older M1841 Mississippi rifle, and "third class" weapons like the Springfield Model 1842 musket.

    List of weapons in the American Civil War

  • The.69 caliber musket had a 42-inch barrel, an overall length of 58 inches, and a weight of 10 pounds (4.5 kg).

    Springfield Model 1840 flintlock musket

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the musca family

mosquitomusket

musket — used about once every 3,411 pages · #8,386 · point at the bar for the others