rocket 2

Speculative, there is disagreement about the origin of this word. MED cites 'Old French [sic] rochet (late 15th cent.), rocet, roquet, a blunt lance head'. OED agrees with this in its sense 2 ('blunt lance head'; the French word is a variant of that which also gives English ratchet) under rocket n.2, but for sense 1 (the sense under consideration here), OED states 'probably' rock (q.v.) 'distaff' + diminutive suffix -et. It is not certain that Middle English would form a diminutive using the borrowed French suffix as early as the fifteenth century. OED does however cite dialectal French roquet, rouquet 'wooden spindle' of the 18th century, which it states is from an unattested French word cognate with Old Occitan roca 'rock, distaff', Spanish rueca, etc. Rochet is the headword found in most standard modern French dictionaries (e.g. Tresor de la Langue Francaise). The 'blunt lance' sense in Old French is attested as far back as the late 13th cent. while the spindle/bobbin sense is not clearly found in continental French before the early modern period, and is not found in Anglo-French. However, forms such as Italian rochetto 'bobbin' in the early thirteenth century suggest the sense existed early in French, and in fact may be primary, assuming that French (< Frankish or a neighbouring Germanic language) had a borrowing of the word 'rock'; indeed TLF states '[d]ér., p. compar. de forme, d'un corresp. non att. du frq. *rokko "quenouille", cf. l'a. h. all. rocko, all. Rocken "id."'. See further discussion at rock.