A musket is an old kind of gun that a soldier held against the shoulder and fired. Armies used muskets from about the 1500s into the 1800s, before the modern rifle took over. The inside of the barrel was usually smooth, so the shot was less true than a later rifle, and loading took time; soldiers often stood in lines and fired together. The name did not start as a gun. It came from a word for a small hawk (a sparrowhawk), itself from a “little fly,” and then people used bird-of-prey names for weapons — the same kind of habit as falcon for a gun. You meet musket in history books and old war stories, not in talk about today’s army.