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moon

Syllabification: (moon)
Pronunciation: /mo͞on/
Translate moon | into French | into German | into Italian | into Spanish
Definition of moon

noun

(the moon or the Moon)
  • the natural satellite of the earth, visible (chiefly at night) by reflected light from the sun.
  • a natural satellite of any planet.
  • literary or humorous a month:many moons had passed since he brought a prospective investor home
  • (the moon) anything that one could desire:you must know he’d give any of us the moon

The earth’s moon orbits the earth in a period of 29.5 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 239,000 miles (384,000 km) and it is 2,160 miles (3,476 km) in diameter. The bright and dark features that outline the face of “the man in the moon” are highland and lowland regions, the high regions being 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] behave or move in a listless and aimless manner:lying in bed eating candy, mooning around
  • act in a dreamily infatuated manner:Timothy’s mooning over her like a schoolboy
  • 2 [with object] informal expose one’s buttocks to (someone) in order to insult or amuse them:Dan had whipped around, bent over, and mooned the crowd

Phrases

many moons ago

informal a long time ago.

over the moon

informal extremely happy; delighted.
[from the cow jumped over the moon, a line from a nursery rhyme]

Derivatives

moonless

adjective

moonlike

Pronunciation: /-ˌlīk/
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)

moon in other Oxford dictionaries

Definition of moon in the British & World English dictionary