Word of the Day

: July 31, 2018

musket

noun MUSS-kut

What It Means

: a heavy large-caliber muzzle-loading usually smoothbore shoulder firearm; broadly : a shoulder gun carried by infantry

musket in Context

"They could see changes going on among the troops. There were marchings this way and that way. A battery wheeled leisurely. On the crest of a small hill was the thick gleam of many departing muskets." — Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 1895

"It's not the gun that kicked off the Revolution with that shot heard round the world, but it's similar. The musket is now in every history book. It's come to symbolize freedom and independence—even celebrated recently on Broadway, in the smash hit, Hamilton." — Lee Cowan, speaking on CBS, 13 Mar. 2016

Did You Know?

In the early era of firearms, cannons of lesser size such as the falconet were sometimes named for birds of prey. Following this pattern, Italians applied moschetto or moschetta, meaning "sparrow hawk," to a small-caliber piece of ordnance in the 16th century. Spaniards borrowed this word as mosquete, and the French as mosquet, but both applied it to a heavy shoulder firearm rather than a cannon; English musket was borrowed soon thereafter from French. The word musket was retained after the original matchlock firing mechanism was replaced by a wheel lock, and retained still after the wheel lock was replaced by the flintlock. As the practice of rifling firearms—incising the barrel with spiral grooves to improve the bullet's accuracy—became more common, the term musket gradually gave way to the newer word rifle in the 18th century.