gibbous

What it means

1. Curved or bulged outward.

   In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]

   1886 May, Thomas Hardy, “chapter 22”, in The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character. […], volume I, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], →OCLC

2. astronomyHaving more than half (but not the whole) of its disc illuminated.

   A glint of the gibbous moon reflected off the water, but it was hard to see the building clearly in the dark forest.

   2024, Margaret Killjoy, The Sapling Cage, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   The moving moon, full, gibbous, or crescent-shaped, shone at last for the navigators of the eighteenth century like a luminous hand on the clock of heaven.

   1995, Dava Sobel, Longitude, Herper Perennial, published 2011, →ISBN, page 89

   On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a photograph of a gibbous Earth at a distance of eighteen thousand miles from its surface.

   2021, Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, Canongate Books, published 2022, page 252

3. Humpbacked.

   A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back;

   1697, Virgil, “The Eighth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC

In a sentence

In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]

1886 May, Thomas Hardy, “chapter 22”, in The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character. […], volume I, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], →OCLC

Where it comes from

1. Latingibbus“humped, hunched”
2. Middle Englishgibbous
3. Englishgibbous

From Middle English gibbous, from Latin gibbus (“humped, hunched”), probably cognate with cubō (“bend oneself, lie down”), Italian gobba (“humpback”), Ancient Greek κῡφός (kūphós, “humpback, bent”), κύβος (kúbos, “cube, vertebra”), Spanish giboso (“humped”). Also ultimately compare dialectal Norwegian keiv (“slanted, wrong”), German schief (“crooked, slanting”) and Dutch scheef (“crooked, slanting”).