Word of the Day:
musette
What It Means
Any of various small bagpipes having a soft sound, especially with a bellows, which were popular in France in the 17th and early 18th century.
A pastoral air or tune that has a drone imitating such an instrument; also, a dance performed to this music.
Musette in Context
“I gave them money for platform tickets and had them take my baggage. There was a big rucksack and two musettes.”
Did You Know?
From both of the following: * Late Middle English musette (“type of bagpipe”), from Middle French musette, Old French musette (“type of bagpipe”) (modern French musette), from muse (“bagpipe”) + -ette (diminutive suffix). Muse is derived from muser (“to play the bagpipe; (figuratively) to flatter”), perhaps from musel (“muzzle (protruding part of an animal’s head)”) (alluding to a bagpipe player puffing out the cheeks), from Late Latin mūsus (“muzzle”); further etymology uncertain, perhaps expressive of protruding lips and/or influenced by Latin mūgiō (“to bellow, low, moo”), from Proto-Indo-European *mug-, *mūg- (onomatopoeia of the lowing of cattle). * Borrowed from French musette in the 18th century. Sense 2 (“small bag or knapsack with a shoulder strap”) is due to the resemblance of the original knapsack to the bag of bagpipes.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: musette (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “musette.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/musette. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.