Word of the Week – Moon - Roseanna M. White

We talk a lot at Word of the Week about words that are shockingly new or have interesting roots. Well, moon is neither of those things. 😉 But it’s still a fascinating word to study, because of its ancient, ANCIENT history.

It’s no great surprise that the biggest constant in our night sky received a name on day one. Okay, day four, if we’re going by the Genesis narrative. 😉 Which means that the oldest languages we have record of and which led to the languages we know today, which etymologists refer to as the “proto-Indo-European” language or PIE, have the very root word from which moon is derived: me(n)ses. Not all variations preserve that n in the middle, but some do. And historically, the word for the heavenly body and the word for the cycle of that heavenly body, have been interchangeable (moon has meant “month” even in English forever, as an example). Which is where we get:

Mona – Old English and Old Frisian
Mone – Middle English
Moon – Modern English
Mano – Old Saxon and Old High German
Mani – Old Norse
Maane – Danish
Maan – Dutch
Mond – German
Masah – Sanskrit
Mah – Persian
Mis – Armenian
Mene – Greek
Mensis – Latin
Meseci – Old Church Slavonic
Menesis – Lithuanian
Mi – Old Irish
Mis – Welsh
Miz – Breton

By the 1500s, the moon was used metaphorically to refer to anything out of reach. It wasn’t until 1665 that moon was used to refer to the satellite of any planet.

As for the verb that is, ahem, usually used in reference to pulling one’s clothing down, that particular prank, let’s call it, didn’t earn the name moon until the 1960s–it’s probably from a sense of moon being slang for the buttocks from the 1760s but is likely also influenced by a sense dating to the early 1600s meaning “to expose to the moonlight.” The verb sense of “idle about or gaze moodily” is from the 1830s.

So what about Luna? In Latin, Luna was the goddess of the moon, and the word came to mean “the moon” as well, as a differentiation from mensis, which also meant month. Both words could refer to the heavenly body, but Luna carried the sense of a deity and mensis of the physical body whose movements help us tell time.