Have you ever wondered where the word muscle comes from? It's from Latin. In Latin mūs means mouse. The suffix -culus is a diminutive suffix. Thus mūsculus means “little mouse,” which kind of makes sense since if you look at a muscle moving on your body, it kind of looks like some critter is scurrying under your skin. In Russian the root мыш- means mouse. The suffix -ца is a diminutive suffix. One of the words for muscle in Russian is мышца. When you take the roots and suffixes of a word in one language, and you substitute the roots and suffixes of another language to make a new word in that language, we call that word a calque. Мышца is a Russian calque from a Latin word. Interestingly enough, something similar happens in Polish. The Polish root for mouse is myš-, and -ca is a diminutive suffix. The Polish word myšca is also a calque from Latin and means muscle. Here are some sample sentences: