Musket
late 16th century: from French mousquet, from Italian moschetto ‘crossbow bolt’, from mosca ‘a fly’.
wiktionary
First attested around 1210 as a surname, and later in the 1400s as a word for the sparrowhawk (Middle English forms: musket, muskett, muskete(“sparrow hawk”)), [1] [2] from Middle French mousquet, from Old Italian moschetto (a diminutive of mosca(“fly”), from Latin musca) used to refer initially to a sparrowhawk (given its small size or speckled appearance) [2] and then a crossbow arrow. The name was subsequently adopted for a heavier, shoulder-fired version of an arquebus, [2] [3] [4] adhering to a pattern of naming firearms and cannons after birds of prey and similar creatures (compare falcon, falconet), [2] [4] a sense which was also borrowed into French and then (around 1580) [3] into English. [4] Cognate to Spanish mosquete, Portuguese mosquete. [4] Smoothbore firearms continued to be called muskets even as they switched from using matchlocks to flintlocks to percussion locks, but with the advent of rifled muskets, the word was finally displaced by rifle. [4]
etymonline
musket (n.)
"firearm for infantry" (later replaced by the rifle), 1580s, from French mousquette, also the name of a kind of sparrow-hawk, diminutive of mosca "a fly," from Latin musca (see midge). The hawk so called either for its size or because it looks speckled when in flight.
Early firearms often were given names of beasts (compare dragoon, also falcon, a kind of cannon mentioned by Hakluyt), and the equivalent word in Italian was used to mean "an arrow for a crossbow." Wedgwood also compares culverin, a simple early sort of firearm, from French couleuvrine, from couleuvre "grass snake."
French mousquette had been borrowed earlier into Middle English (late 14c.; c. 1200 as a surname) in its literal sense of "sparrow-hawk."
