Mosquito
//məˈski.toʊ// name, noun, verb
name, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A small flying insect of the family Culicidae, the females of which bite humans and animals and suck blood, leaving an itching bump on the skin, and sometimes carrying diseases like malaria, dengue and yellow fever.
"I do not quite know what it was that made me poke my head out of the friendly shelter of the blanket, perhaps because I found that the mosquitoes were biting right through it."
- 2 The De Havilland Mosquito, a Second World War military aircraft. historical
- 3 Dated form of Miskito. alt-of, dated
- 4 two-winged insect whose female has a long proboscis to pierce the skin and suck the blood of humans and animals wordnet
Verb
- 1 To fly close to the ground, seemingly without a course.
Proper Noun
- 1 A settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Example
More examples"I've got mosquito bites all over my arm."
Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish mosquito (“gnat”), diminutive of mosca (“fly”), from Latin musca (“fly”), from Proto-Indo-European *mūs- (“fly, stinging fly, gnat”). Cognate with West Flemish meuzie (“mosquito”), dialectal Swedish mausa (“fly”), Lithuanian musė (“a fly”) and Sicilian muschitta (“midge”). See also midge. First attested in the 1580s.
Related phrases
More for "mosquito"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.