Moonlight

How to spell moonlight

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce moonlight

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does moonlight mean?

1. nounThe light from the sun that is reflected off the moon and seen at night.
2. verbTo work a second job, usually in the evening, in addition to one's main employment.

Moonlight in a sentence

• noun

  The path was just visible in the pale moonlight.

• verb

  Many teachers moonlight as tutors to top up their income.

• noun

  They walked along the beach by moonlight after dinner.

• verb

  He had to moonlight as a delivery driver to cover the rent.

Where does moonlight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Moonlight is a transparent compound of two very old native English words, mona meaning the moon and leoht meaning light or brightness, both inherited from Old English and ultimately from the Germanic ancestor of English. The noun, describing the soft light the moon casts at night, is recorded from around the fourteenth century, and its spelling has stayed wonderfully regular because both halves remain everyday words in their own right. The figurative verb sense, meaning to hold a second job in addition to one's main employment, is much younger and grew up in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the image being of someone working extra hours after dark. Because moon and light are both common and unambiguous, the only thing a writer has to remember is that the two are joined into a single solid word with no space and no hyphen. The related word moonlit, meaning lit by the moon, comes from exactly the same pairing.

How the word is built

• moon (Old English mona: the moon)
• light (Old English leoht: brightness)