mosquito

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A small flying insect of the family Culicidae, the females of which bite humans and animals and suck blood, leaving an itching bump on the skin, and sometimes carrying diseases like malaria, dengue and yellow fever.

   I do not quite know what it was that made me poke my head out of the friendly shelter of the blanket, perhaps because I found that the mosquitoes were biting right through it.

2. 2
   noun

   two-winged insect whose female has a long proboscis to pierce the skin and suck the blood of humans and animals

3. 3
   verb

   To fly close to the ground, seemingly without a course.

4. 4
   name

   A settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador.

5. 5
   noun

   The De Havilland Mosquito, a Second World War military aircraft.

6. 6
   noun

   Dated form of Miskito.

Etymology

Borrowed from Spanish mosquito (“gnat”), diminutive of mosca (“fly”), from Latin musca (“fly”), from Proto-Indo-European *mūs- (“fly, stinging fly, gnat”). Cognate with West Flemish meuzie (“mosquito”), dialectal Swedish mausa (“fly”), Lithuanian musė (“a fly”) and Sicilian muschitta (“midge”). See also midge. First attested in the 1580s.