moon

 
Pronunciation: /muːn/

noun

  • (also Moon) the natural satellite of the earth, visible (chiefly at night) by reflected light from the sun: there was no moon, but a sky sparkling with brilliant stars the first man on the moon
  • a natural satellite of any planet: Titan, Saturn’s largest moon
  • literary or humorous a month: that wonderful night four moons ago I got my first laser printer many moons ago
  • (the moon) anything that one could desire: you must know he’d give you the moon
  • The moon orbits the earth in a period of 27.32 days, going through a series of phases from new moon to full moon and back again during that time. Its average distance from the earth is some 384,000 km and it is 3,476 km in diameter. The bright and dark features which outline the face of ‘the Man in the Moon’ are highland and lowland regions, the former heavily pockmarked by craters due to the impact of meteorites. The moon has no atmosphere, and the same side is always presented to the earth

verb

  • 1 [no object, with adverbial] behave or move in a listless and aimless manner: I don’t want her mooning about in the morning
  • act in a dreamily infatuated manner: Timothy’s mooning over her like a schoolboy
  • 2 [no object] informal expose one’s buttocks to someone in order to insult or amuse them: the crew dropped their trousers and mooned at them [with object]: Dan had whipped round, bent over, and mooned the crowd

Phrases

over the moon

informal, chiefly British extremely happy; delighted: they’re going on holiday on Wednesday so they’re all over the moon
[from The Cow jumped over the Moon, a line from a nursery rhyme]

Derivatives

moonless

adjective

moonlet

noun

moonlike

adjective

Origin:

Old English mōna, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch maan and German Mond, also to month, from an Indo-European root shared by Latin mensis and Greek mēn 'month', and also Latin metiri 'to measure' (the moon being used to measure time)