Mosque

How to spell mosque

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mosque

What does mosque mean?

1. nounA building used by Muslims for communal prayer and worship.

Mosque in a sentence

• The call to prayer echoed from the mosque at dawn.

• Visitors are asked to remove their shoes before entering the mosque.

Where does mosque come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

The word traces back to the Arabic masjid, which literally meant 'a place of prostration', built on the verb sajada, 'to bow down' or 'to prostrate oneself', describing the act of touching the forehead to the ground in prayer. As the word travelled west it was reshaped at every stop: it passed into Spanish as mezquita, into Italian as moschea, and then into French as mosquée, before English picked it up in the late 1300s and 1400s. Early English spellings were wildly inconsistent, including forms like 'muskey' and 'moseak', and the modern French-influenced ending only settled in the 1700s. That borrowed French -que ending is exactly the spelling trap, since the word sounds as if it should simply end in -sk. The same Semitic root that gave us masjid is still visible in the alternative English term 'masjid' used by many Muslim communities today.

How the word is built

• mosque (single root; from Arabic masjid 'place of prostration', reshaped through Italian and French to the -que spelling)