Other forms: mussels
A mussel is a blue-black shellfish steamed open in wine. A pot of mussels, steam the mussels, mussel shells.
The rule is to throw away any that will not close before cooking and any that will not open after it. They cling to rocks with a beard of tough threads, which is pulled off before cooking and is one of the strongest natural adhesives known.
1nounmusselA blue-black shellfish steamed open in wine.
“We collected mussels from the rocks at low tide.”
mussel is a shellfish.
Old English muscle comes from Latin musculus, a little mouse, which also gave the word muscle.
Latin
muscula
Proto-West Germanic
*muskulā
Old English
muscle
Middle English
muscle — mussel
English, today
mussel
From Middle English muscle (“mussel”), from Old English muscle, from Proto-West Germanic muskulā, from Latin muscula, from Latin mūsculus (“mussel, muscle”) literally “little mouse”. a doublet of muscle.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA