Meanings
plural moon crickets · alternative mooncricket · alternative moon-cricket
- USethnicslangslurA black person.
Rooney Baxter, The Bluegrass Kid (page 182), 2015. They don't have a good enough reason to come at us now. And besides, moon crickets do drive-bys. This feels like a message from someone else.
2 more examples
Her Dad had been someone her Mom didn't know in Houston. I always used to joke, "Maybe he was a Moon-Cricket from Alabama," but Trish is totally not black.
2018, Tzvi Peckar III, Mini Thins, page 285Quoted in 2020, Leslie Picca, Joe Feagin, Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage When we were leaving it was getting dark and my husband says to me “look at all of those moon crickets.” I confusingly asked him what he had meant by that. When we got into the car, he explained to me that all of the black people walking around under the moonlight look like a bunch of crickets scurrying around.
Synonyms & antonyms
Origin
From moon + cricket. Perhaps a reference to slaves singing songs during the night.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
moon cricket. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/moon%20cricket
“moon cricket.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/moon%20cricket. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “moon cricket,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/moon%20cricket.
Source: moon cricket on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.