1580: muscle Apr 12, 2019

The vast majority of medical or scientific terms come from either Latin or Greek in some form, and while these may be considered serious or official in English, this isn’t always the case for where the terms derive. The word ‘muscle’ comes from the word ‘mus’, the Latin word for ‘mouse’, with the rest of ‘musculus’ being a Latin diminutive suffix. Muscles were seen to look like little mice.