musket
n.n. a long, heavy gun that was used by soldiers in the past. It is slower to reload than a modern rifle.
n. a long-barrelled, shoulder-fired smoothbore firearm, typically used by infantry in the 16th to 19th centuries.
The soldiers loaded their muskets before the battle began.
The museum display features a historical musket that was used during the American Revolution.
The transition from the musket to the rifle marked a significant shift in military tactics, as the latter allowed for much greater accuracy and range on the battlefield.
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”)), 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) and then a crossbow arrow. The name was subsequently adopted for a heavier, shoulder-fired version of an arquebus, adhering to a pattern of naming firearms and cannons after birds of prey and similar creatures (compare falcon, falconet), a sense which was also borrowed into French and then (around 1580) into English. Cognate to Spanish mosquete, Portuguese mosquete. 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.