Muscid

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Any true fly belonging to the family Muscidae, which includes the common housefly and its close relatives
2. A member of the dipteran family Muscidae, a large group of flies that includes the housefly and stable fly
3. Referring to an insect of the family Muscidae, a diverse group of two-winged flies found worldwide

Etymology: Zoologists name families by adding a suffix to a genus name, and this one comes from a Greek patronymic ending meaning "descendant of" or "son of." So a family name is, in effect, a label for the descendants of a founding genus. Here the genus is "Musca," the Latin word for "fly," and "Muscidae" means roughly "the fly-descendants." The ending was borrowed into scientific Latin as "-idae," the standard marker for animal families. A muscid is any member of that family, which includes the house fly and its many relatives, such as stable flies and blow flies. The word was formed in New Latin, the scientific Latin used by naturalists, so it was never an everyday English word and has no separate history in ordinary speech. Its meaning stays fixed to the classification.