moony

English

Etymology

From moon +‎ -y.

Adjective

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.
   • 1985 February, Robert Wernick, “Rousseau: the customs clerk who created a world of wonder”, in Smithsonian‎^[5], volume 15, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, →ISSN, page 80:

     In one of his earliest known paintings, A Carnival Evening, which was shown at the Salon des Independants in 1886, the clown may reflect the influence of Watteau, the clown's girlfriend perhaps was taken from an advertisement for chocolates, the lacy tangle of branches in the trees possibly echoes a postcard photograph of the Bois de Boulogne. They all fit together in a moony atmosphere which is the Duanier's own.

   • 2001 April, Ethlie Ann Vare, “Star-Crossed” (17:10), in David Warry-Smith, director, Andromeda, season 1, episode 20 (science fiction), spoken by Seamus Zelazny Harper (Gordon Michael Woolvett), Fireworks Entertainment:

     We're facing the second baddest ship in the known universe and our AI is making moony eyes at Mr. Tall, Spark, and Handsome!

   • 2010, Mahmoud Mansi, A Journey from Darkness to Light, page 39:

     It was a moony velleity, but was done to just calm his heart...at least for a while.

5. Sickly or tipsy.

Related terms

• moonish, moonlike, moonly

Noun

moony (plural moonies)

1. (slang) The act of mooning, flashing the buttocks.

   She was doing a moony.

2. (dated) A silly person.

Alternate forms

• mooney

Anagrams

• -onomy