Mosquito is Spanish and means "little fly" — mosca, "fly," plus the diminutive -ito. Behind the Spanish is Latin musca, "fly," from an Indo-European root for gnats and flies that is probably imitative of their humming.
The satisfying part is the English cousin. That same root produced Old English mycg, which is modern English midge. So mosquito and midge are the same ancient word, one arriving through Spanish in the 1580s with Latin behind it, the other inherited directly and continuously from the Germanic side. English is full of these pairs, and they are one of the better arguments for learning to read spellings: mosquito looks entirely foreign and midge looks entirely native, and they are the same insect and the same word.
mosquito (n.) name given to gnat-like insects the females of which bite animals and draw blood through a piercing and sucking proboscis, 1580s, from Spanish mosquito "little gnat," diminutive of mosca "fly," from Latin musca "fly," from PIE root *mu- "gnat, fly" (compare Sanskrit maksa- , Greek myia , Old English mycg , Modern English midge , Old Church Slavonic mucha ), perhaps imitative of the sound of humming insects. Related: Mosquital . Mosquito-hawk as a name for a kind of dragon-fly which preys on mosquitoes is from 1737. Mosquito-net "gauze or other fabric used as a screen against mosquitoes" is from 1745. also from 1580s
mosquito came in through Later and wider borrowings, and its spelling follows that family's conventions.
What gives it away on the page
| -o/-a endings, ll, rr, ny for ñ | Spanish — much of it from the Americas.tornado, cargo, plaza, armadillo, guerrilla, canyon, mosquito |
Later and wider borrowings in the spelling guide · guess another word's family