gibbous

comparative more gibbous · superlative most gibbous

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