musket
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "musket", 6-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "musket" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "musket" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
musket is aEnglishnoun. It means: A kind of firearm formerly carried by the infantry of an army, originally fired by means of a match, or matchlock, for which several mechanical appliances (including the flintlock, and finally the ... Pronounced /ˈmʌskət/. Often confused with must and muster.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | musket |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmʌskət/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #32,931 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 11 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for musket is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmʌskət/. Corpus data places it at rank #32,931 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for musket, with forms such as "mmusket", "msuket", and "mukset". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 11 confusable-pair relationships, "must", "muster", "mussel", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: First attested around 1210 as a surname, and later in the 1400s as a word for the sparrowhawk (Middle English forms: musket, muskett, muskete (“sparrow hawk”)), from Middle French mousquet, from Old Italian moschetto (a diminutive of mosca (“fly”), from Lat… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is musket, spelled M-U-S-K-E-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A kind of firearm formerly carried by the infantry of an army, originally fired by means of a match, or matchlock, for which several mechanical appliances (including the flintlock, and finally the percussion lock) were successively substituted; ultimately superseded by the rifle.
- 2A male Eurasian sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus).
Etymology
First attested around 1210 as a surname, and later in the 1400s as a word for the sparrowhawk (Middle English forms: musket, muskett, muskete (“sparrow hawk”)), from Middle French mousquet, from Old Italian moschetto (a diminutive of mosca (“fly”), from Latin musca) used to refer initially to a sparrowhawk (given its small size or speckled appearance) and then a crossbow arrow. The name was subsequently adopted for a heavier, shoulder-fired version of an arquebus, adhering to a pattern of naming firearms and cannons after birds of prey and similar creatures (compare falcon, falconet), a sense which was also borrowed into French and then (around 1580) into English. Cognate to Spanish mosquete, Portuguese mosquete. Smoothbore firearms continued to be called muskets even as they switched from using matchlocks to flintlocks to percussion locks, but with the advent of rifled muskets, the word was finally displaced by rifle.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: mmusket,msuket,mukset,musekt,muskett,muskket,muskte,mussket,umsket
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for musket
Misspelling Variants of "musket"
Frequency rank: #32,931 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: