moony

comparative moonier · superlative mooniest

1. Resembling the Moon.

   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.

   1881, Oscar Wilde, “Charmides”, in Poems, London: David Bogue, […], →OCLC, page 136

   Synonyms: moonlike, moonish

2. Moonlit.

   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.

   c. 1915, G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown's Solution

   2 more examples

   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.

   1816, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, “Agnes And the Water-Sprite”, in Poems, London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 26

   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.

   1898, H. G. Wells, Jimmy Goggles the God

3. figurativelyAbsent-minded; easily distracted; daydreaming.

   “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?”

   1896, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 1, in Tom Sawyer, Detective

   1 more example

   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.

   2011 July 28, Terry Castle, “Do I like it?”, in London Review of Books, volume 33, number 15, →ISSN

4. figurativelySilly; sentimental; mooning over something.

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

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

   2 more examples

   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.

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

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

   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

5. Sickly or tipsy.

plural moonies · alternative mooney

1. slangThe act of mooning, flashing the buttocks.

   She was doing a moony.

2. datedA silly person.