missile [E17th] The root of missile is a form of Latin mittere ‘to send’, found also in words such as dismiss [LME] and *message. The earliest missiles were gifts, such as sweets, thrown to crowds by Roman emperors. From there the word came to mean, in the 1650s, an object which is forcibly propelled at a target—the modern sense of a rocket or similar weapon is first found in 1945. Mission [M16th] is also from Latin mittere. Mission: Impossible was an American TV series that was first shown between 1966 and 1973, and from 1996 used as the basis of films of the same name.