Mosquito > Moschito > Mosquito
/məˈskito/ — [mɒˈskiːtəʊ], [məˈskiːtəʊ], [mɒˈskitoʊ], [məˈskitoʊ]
The name of this insect is spelled with the letters ‹qu› in several languages, including Catalan mosquit, Spanish mosquito, French moustique, Galician mosquito, and Portuguese mosquito (also borrowed Hmong and Lao mosquito).
Its original name in Latin was culex but in Italian, it is called a zanzara, derived from zinzala the more recent Latin name. Evidently, the English borrowed the Spanish term, mosquito, but a number of English authors, for some unexplained reason, preferred spelling the /ki/ sound using the letters ‹chi›. For example,
- The tortures we received on the river, from the moschitos, were beyond imagination. We had provided ourselves with guetres, and moschito clothes; but to very little purpose. The whole day we were in continual motion to keep them off;
The London Magazine, Or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer, 1759
- The moschito does not, it is true, commence its annoying operations till after the very warmest weather of the summer; but, having once taken wing, nothing will stop its flight but a real frost; so that it is almost fairly winter before this malignant …
Journal of a Tour in Italy, and also in part of France and Switzerland, 1830
Entomology, confined within limits such as these, is a dull, worthless, and contemptible study.
This branch of natural history, however, has a wider range and nobler field of usefulness; and though some pseudo philosophers have sneered at the diminutive creatures thus contemplated, they show but the feebleness of their own understanding. Insulated, they may occasionally appear of little note, but with a commission from above become “as the armies of the living God.” The contemptible moschito may drive man to madness and the zimb of Chaldea make even the rhinoceros tremble and flee before it.
Researches in Natural History, 1830
- …the circle of his flight [the bald eagle] grows less; now he appears a small speck, and now no bigger than the tip end of the hair of a moscheto's eyebrow; now he is out of sight in the
deep blue heaven.
The New-England Magazine, 1831, and further still…
Of the Fly-catcher tribe, […] These birds, as their appellation signifies, live solely on flies, moschetoes, bugs, etc.
Etymonline says
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.
Chestions
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Why did these writers choose to spell mosquito with ‹ch› instead of the easier ‹qu›? The letter ‹k› could have been used to imitate the /ki/ sound. After all, in German it is spelled Moskito, which works perfectly fine.
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Does anyone know the history of this word's spelling?
The following questions on EL&U are related but do not explain why mosquito was also spelled moschito in English.
- Why is "q" followed by a "u"?
- "Quyer" When and why did the spelling change so drastically? (this last one is mine)
Yes. Yes yes yes all right. The ‹qu› in "questions is pronounced /kw/ not /ki/. There's no need to quick up a fuss, I'm just having a bit of fun 🙂
Best Answer
My answer focuses on how the spelling of mosquito evolved in English dictionaries between 1658 and 1909. In this narrow sense, I’m trying to track the history of the word’s spelling.
Walking with the dictionaries
Here is a chronological journey through the spellings of mosquito that appear in the various dictionaries that I consulted.
Thomas Blount, Glossographia Or a Dictionary: Interpreting All Such Hard Words (1656) is the earliest dictionary I found to address the pernicious bug:
I have not been able to identify the source that Blount cites for his spelling of the word. Searches of William Turner, A New Herball (1551) and John Gerard, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plants (1597), for example, yield no matches for muscheto.
Two years later, Edward Phillips, The New World of Words (1658) offers a somewhat more nuanced description:
Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary (1676) adds an etymology to an Italian root word:
The entry remains unchanged in the 1717 edition of Coles.
The author of Glossographia Anglicana Nova (1707)—not Thomas Blount, who died in 1679—seems to have cribbed Phillips's definition:
Edward Phillips & John Kersey, The New World of Words, sixth edition (1709) has two entries:
The same entries appear in the seventh edition of Phillips & Kersey (1720), and essentially the same entries appear in Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), continuing through at least the third edition (1721).
Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, second edition (1724) has this:
Editions of this dictionary through the 21st edition (1775) continue to include both of these entries. Oddly enough, however, Editions of Bailey’s The New Universal English Dictionary, fifth edition (1760) moves the entry for moscheto/muschetto to appear alphabetically between murther and muscles:
Thomas Dyche & William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary (1735) has a much expanded definition that focuses on what is now known as the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua:
This entry persists unaltered through the eleventh edition of Dyche & Pardon (1760).
John Kersey, A New English Dictionary, fourth edition (1739) also has two entries:
The seventh edition of Kersey (1757) drops the entry for muscheto, however.
Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (1756) contains no entry for any spelling of mosquito, although (as RaceYouAnytime observes in a note elsewhere on this page) his entry for gnat specifies that the latter word refers to “a small winged stinging insect,” which might be taken as synonymous with mosquito. However, so many contemporaneous and earlier dictionaries do have entries for mosquito in one spelling or another that I doubt Johnson omitted it on the reasoning that having an entry for gnat obviated the need for an entry for mosquito. Whatever the case may be, H. J. Todd’s revision of Johnson’s Dictionary (1818) includes the following entry:
Purchas is Samuel Purchas, and his book is Purchas His Pilgrimage; Or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places ... (1617), which includes this observation about the natives of Dominica (on page 953 of the 1626 edition):
John Ash, The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775) returns to the complication of there being an insect and a New World region with similar names:
Evidently, Ashe takes the view that the moschetto is a West Indian gnat, whereas the muscheto (or muschetto) is an American gnat.
Thomas Sheridan, A Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1780) reverts to a single spelling:
The same entry appears in Sheridan’s second edition (1789) and in Stephen Jones, Sheridan Improved: A General Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language (1798).
At the turn of the nineteenth century, then, most dictionaries seem committed to moschetto, muscheto, or both. John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language (1807) doesn’t do much to rock the boat:
But Noah Webster, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) does:
Where did musketoe come from? A Google search turns up just one source for it older than Webster’s first dictionary—Michel Adanson, A Voyage to Senegal: The Isle of Goreé, and the River Gambia (1759):
It bears noting that the term Musketoe here refers to a place name in West Africa, making it a less than ideal precedent for the spelling of a gnat widely identified in the early nineteenth century as endemic to the West Indies and America. I think it is more than likely that Webster based his spelling on his personal preference for relatively phonetic orthography. That is to say, he made it up. He persisted in it, too. His American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) has this entry:
The 1842 abridged version of his complete 1840 second edition dictionary indicates that Webster is relenting slightly:
The 1847 edition of Webster’s dictionary—the first one published following Noah Webster’s death and the Merriam brothers’ acquisition of publishing rights to it—goes a step further, adding a cross-reference entry for mosquito (“See MUSQUITO”) and putting the main entry under the key words “MUSQUITO, MUSKETO,” although it concludes the definition there with a note insisting that musketo is better:
Preferable to Noah Webster, anyway. The 1864 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language almost entirely gives up the musketo cause, offering instead these two entries:
Webster’s International Dictionary (1890) took the unusual step of reintroducing an entry for musketo; but it, like the entry for musquito, now said merely “See MOSQUITO.” Finally, in Webster’s New International Dictionary (1909) all mention of musketo and musquito vanished.
Interestingly, Joseph Worcester, A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language (1850) endorsed mosquito well before his enemy Webster did:
In fact, Worcester had included mosquito as one of two valid spellings of the word in his Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language (1830), before Webster acknowledged the spelling at all:
What are we to make of all this?
The key developments chronologically are as follows:
On this record, it seems to me that by 1800 moschetto and muscheto were fairly strongly established in dictionaries as the preferred English spelling of the word. The case for either or both would have been stronger if Samuel Johnson had endorsed it or them, but he demurred, for reasons unknown.
Then came the upheaval of 1806, when Noah Webster, as part of his simplified spelling scheme, introduced musketoe, essentially out of the blue. Although this innovation began to fade after less than half a century, it seems to have helped knock out both moschetto and muscheto. They don’t appear as entries—even as cross reference entries—in any of the U.S. dictionaries I checked from the period 1806–1909.
One inexplicable shift that occurred soon after the debut of musketoe was Todd's replacement in 1818 of the perennial English favorites muscheto and moschetto in his revision of Johnson's dictionary with muskitto and musquitto. It isn't out of the question that he was influenced by the debut of musketoe in Webster's 1806 Compendious Dictionary, but I think it's rather more likely that the impetus came from somewhere else—I just don't know where. Webster's serious claim to international fame was his 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language—ten years after Todd's revision of Johnson appeared. The demise of muscheto and moschetto in England is not yet satisfactorily explained.
A major factor that I didn’t examine in any detail may be the Linnaean revolution in species naming. Linnaeus published Systema Naturae in 1735, but the interest in species categorization grew stronger and stronger as science advanced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the differentiation of scientific names came a stronger motivation to distinguish the common names of similar-looking species. The effect in this case, I suspect, was to give serious prominence to the word mosquito at a time when the traditional spellings of the English word had gone into eclipse and yet no one was especially enthusiastic about the new, semi-phonetic options musketoe and muskitto.
Presented with a vacuum in preferred spelling, the entomologists who took on the serious business of naming species of Culex and assigning them distinct common names seem to have found the imported spelling mosquito appealing, and they gravitated to it. In any event, adoption of the new spelling seems to have happened surprisingly quickly: by 1830 Worcester was listing mosquito as the primary spelling, though it seems to have been virtually unknown thirty years earlier.