mosquito

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A small flying insect whose females bite people and animals to suck blood, leaving an itchy bump and sometimes spreading diseases.

   A mosquito bit my arm and left an itchy red bump.

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.

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