English edit

Etymology edit

moon +‎ -y

Adjective edit

moony (comparative moonier, superlative mooniest)

  1. Resembling the moon.
    • 1881, Oscar Wilde, “Charmides”, in Poems[1]:
      (Her white throat whiter than a moony pearl / Just threaded with a blue vein’s tapestry / Had not yet ceased to throb, and still her breast / Swayed like a wind-stirred lily in ambiguous unrest)
  2. Moonlit.
    • 1816, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, “Agnes And the Water-Sprite”, in Poems[2], London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 26:
      And oft at midnight’s moony scene
      A faded form of ghastly mien
       Across the waves doth glide;
      And oft upon the passing gales
      A plaintive voice the ear assails,
       When wand’ring by the tide.
    • 1898, H. G. Wells, Jimmy Goggles the God[3]:
      It was an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind of reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed that floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just a moony, deep green-blue.
    • c. 1915, G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown's Solution:
      I peered at his rather featureless face through the moony twilight; and then he suddenly rose and paced the path with the impatience of a schoolboy.
  3. (figurative) Absent-minded.
    • 1896, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 1, in Tom Sawyer, Detective:
      “Well, ain’t it strange? Why, Aunt Polly, he was always so good and kind and moony and absent-minded and chuckle-headed and lovable—why, he was just an angel! What CAN be the matter of him, do you reckon?”
    • 2011 July 28, Terry Castle, “Do I like it?”, in London Review of Books[4], volume 33, number 15, →ISSN:
      Less violent, but no less eerie, was a teenage girl with Down’s syndrome who suddenly lolloped up to me on a sidewalk in Tacoma, Washington – I being then a morose and moony college student – and kissed me on the cheek.
  4. (figurative) Silly; sentimental; mooning over something.
  5. Sickly or tipsy.

Related terms edit

Noun edit

moony (plural moonies)

  1. (slang) The act of mooning, flashing the buttocks.
    She was doing a moony.
  2. (dated) A silly person.

Alternate forms edit

Anagrams edit