masca

Meaning

1. femininewitch, hag
2. femininespectre; nightmare
3. femininemask

Declension

Origins

Proto-Indo-European *mesg-der. Proto-Germanic *maskwǭ Proto-West Germanic *maskābor. Latin masca From Proto-West Germanic *maskā (“mesh”), from the practice of wearing mesh netting over the face as a mask to filter air, keeping soot and dust particles from entering the lungs. As in German Larve or Fratze—and other words the reader may adduce for completion—, via the idea of any nightmarish appearance senses of “a spectre” and “a witch” secondarily derived, though they be attested and perhaps borrowed before the main sense in Latin. A variation with an -r- suffix, perhaps *maskā + *-þr + *-ā, found already simplified in Old English mæsċre, was presumably also borrowed into Latin, to account for Italian maschera, resolving the consonant cluster further by anaptyxis, and perhaps connecting the Latin-Romance suffix -āria, and some adduce Old French mascurer, maschurer (“to blacken (the face)”), Occitan mascarar, Catalan mascarar, Walloon maxhurer, derived from mascher (“to thump”) and well-known Arabic مَسْخَرَة (masḵara, “buffoon, fool, laughing-stock, anything ridiculous”) from سَخِرَ (saḵira, “to ridicule, to laugh at”), for which derivation one would have to imagine Early Islamic society inclined to comedy even towards the Christian world, apparently contrasting the dark notions behind the Germanic term.