Mosquito
nounA small flying insect whose female bites people and animals to feed on blood, often spreading disease.
How to spell mosquito
8 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce mosquito
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does mosquito mean?
- nounA small flying insect whose female bites people and animals to feed on blood, often spreading disease.
Mosquito in a sentence
-
A single mosquito kept her awake with its high whine all night.
-
Travellers to the region carry repellent because each mosquito may carry malaria.
Where does mosquito come from?
Language of origin: Spanish
The word comes from Spanish and Portuguese mosquito, which literally means 'little fly'. It was built from mosca, the word for a fly, which traces back to the Latin musca with exactly the same meaning, plus the diminutive ending -ito that turns something into a smaller version of itself. English picked the word up in the late 1500s, a period when Spanish and Portuguese explorers were sailing through tropical regions where these biting insects were a constant nuisance. The same Latin musca survives in the scientific Musca, the genus of the common housefly, so the link between mosquito and 'fly' is more than just a coincidence. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unexpected 'qu' (pronounced like a plain 'k') and the absence of any 'e', which trips writers who expect 'musket' or 'mosquitoe' instead.
How the word is built
- mosc- (from Latin musca: a fly)
- -ito (Spanish/Portuguese diminutive: little)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.