How Did Muscles Get Their Name, What Does it Mean, and Where Did the Word Come From?

In the average adult male body, there are forty-five pounds of bone compared to sixty-five pounds of muscle.

The average female is 15 percent less.

We call them muscles because when a Roman physician saw how they rippled under the skin when flexed, it reminded him of the skittering of a small mouse, or musculus, and so that’s what he called them.

En route to English, the small mouse musculus became muscle.