Mouse

How to spell mouse

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mouse

What does mouse mean?

1. nounA small rodent with a pointed snout and a long thin tail.
2. nounA hand-held device used to control the pointer on a computer screen.

Mouse in a sentence

• A tiny mouse darted across the kitchen floor.

• She clicked the left button on her mouse to open the file.

• The cat cornered a mouse behind the cupboard.

• The wireless mouse needed a fresh battery before the meeting.

Where does mouse come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Mouse descends from the Old English mus, which meant the small rodent and goes back to a very ancient root shared across the Indo-European family; the same word survives as Maus in German and mus in Latin, and even the Sanskrit musha meant 'mouse', from a verb sense of 'to steal', since the little creatures pilfered grain. The peculiar plural 'mice' comes from an old sound change called i-mutation, where a following vowel pulled the root vowel forward, which is why English keeps mouse/mice rather than a regular 'mouses'. The word stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, with the spelling settling on the silent-looking 'ou' to represent the long vowel. In the 1960s the term was cleverly reused for the small hand-held pointing device, supposedly because the cord trailing from it resembled a rodent's tail. That modern computing sense is now so common that many adults meet the word far more often on a desk than in a barn.

How the word is built

• mouse (single, native root); plural form is irregular: mice, not 'mouses'