Every word has a story

muscle — English 'muscle' and 'mussel' are the same word. Latin *musculus* named the shellfish and the bicep simultaneously — both seen as resembling a mouse or a mouse-shaped lump. Middle English inherited both senses as 'muscle' and only resolved the ambiguity by gradually spelling the shellfish differently. There was no new word coined; English simply wrote its way out of an ambiguity that Latin held comfortably for centuries.

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