musette.
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.
Meaning & usage
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.
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.
An organ stop using reed pipes with cone-shaped resonators, found in organs in France in the 17th and 18th centuries.
A small oboe without a cap for its reed, which evolved from the chanter or pipe of bagpipes; a piccolo oboe.
In full musette bag: a small bag or knapsack with a shoulder strap, formerly used by soldiers, and now (cycling) chiefly by cyclists to hold food and beverages or other items.
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.