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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.
Examples of musket in a Sentence
Pamela Brown, Hartford Courant, 18 Mar. 2025
The musket ball was finally removed 17 years after Miller was wounded.
—Doug Ross, Chicago Tribune, 12 Feb. 2025
The Sassenach’s survival is an important development, given that Mrs. Fraser ended the previous episode with a musket ball in her liver and an alarming amount of her blood on the ground.
—Kimberly Roots, TVLine, 6 Jan. 2025
In recent decades, however, the military has also been polluting the home front, most notably with a toxic chemical never heard of in the era of muskets and drums: PFAS.
—Jeffrey Kluger, TIME, 25 Sep. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Musket.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/musket. Accessed 5 Apr. 2025.
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musket
noun
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