mosquito: [16] Mosquito comes ultimately from the Latin word for ‘fly’, musca (this went back to an Indo-European base *mu-, probably imitative of the sound of humming, which also produced English midge [OE], and hence its derivative midget [19] – originally a ‘tiny sand-fly’). Musca became Spanish mosca, whose diminutive form reached English as mosquito – etymologically a ‘small fly’. (The Italian descendant of musca, incidentally, is also mosca, and its diminutive, moschetto, was applied with black humour to the ‘bolt of a crossbow’. From it English gets musket [16].) => midge, midget, musket
mosquito (n.)
1580s, from Spanish mosquito "little gnat," diminutive of mosca "fly," from Latin musca "fly," from PIE root *mu- "gnat, fly," imitative of insect buzzing (compare Sanskrit maksa-, Greek myia, Old English mycg, Modern English midge, Old Church Slavonic mucha), perhaps imitative of the sound of humming insects.
