Phases of the word “moon”

“For human beings originally began philosophy, as they do now,” Aristotle muses in his Metaphysics, “because of wonder … ”

He continues, as translated by Terence Irwin and Gail Fine:

… at first because they wondered at the strange things in front of them, and later because, advancing little by little, they found greater things puzzling—what happens to the moon, the sun and stars, how the universe comes to be.

Because of that wonder, we human beings now know far more about what happens to the moon.

Because of that wonder, the four, valiant astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission have flown around the far side of the moon.

And because of that wonder, they have ventured further than any soul before them—and back.

Our moon.

Our muse. 

Our measurer—if we gaze at the etymology of the word moon.

Moon etymology

The word moon rises up from the Old English móna. The pronunciation and spelling of móna shifted to moon over the course of Middle English.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first records the word moon in De Temporibus Anni (On the Seasons of the Year) by Ælfric, an Anglo-Saxon abbot and author who lived around the year 1000. Along with Bede’s De Temporum Ratione, Ælfric’s De Temporibus Anni helped introduce the Roman-based, four-seasoned, 365-day calendar to Britain.

The Old English móna orbits *mēnōn-, the Proto-Germanic root for “month,” whose center of gravity is, in turn, the Proto-Indo-European *mē–, “to measure.” 

Month etymology

Cultures ancient and modern have indeed variously measured the passage of time according to the phases of the moon, which span about as long as a month.

And that’s no coincidence: the words moon and month are intimately related.

Month flips over from the Old English mónaþ (like monath), another satellite of the Proto-Germanic *mēnōn-.

The OED first records the word month in an Old English translation—conventionally attributed to Alfred the Great, an Anglo-Saxon king who reigned around the year 875—of On the Consolation of Philosophy, composed by the Roman philosopher-politician Boethius in 523.

Meal time

Another sublunary measurement? Meals. (Stay tuned for the “Aftermash” below, where I will treat the word sublunary.)

One of the original senses of meal in English was “time, occasion,” especially a particular, fixed, or suitable time to do something—like eating what we now call a meal.

That makes a phrase like meal time etymologically redundant! 

Another original sense of meal was “a measure,” especially as affixed to other words that specified a unit of measurement. This use principally survives in piecemeal, originally “one piece at a time.” 

The suffix –meal was once productive, as the OED notes, yielding such now-retired gauges as:

• dropmeal (one drop at a time)
• fingermeal (unit of length equal to the breadth of a finger)
• flockmeal (by troops of people)
• footmeal (step by step)
• heapmeal (in heaps)
• pennymeal (at the rate of a penny)
• stoundmeal (from time to time)

Coming down from the Old English mǽl, meal is served up by the Proto-Germanic *mēlą, itself cooked up by the Proto-Indo-European *mē-, “to measure.”

We might eat many a dish made with cornmeal during a meal, but that meal—ground grain—is not related. It is ultimately from the Germanic varietal of a Proto-Indo-European stem meaning “to grind.” For more on this root, see my past post on emolument.

Monthly cycles

Related to the English month is its Latin counterpart, mēnsis. Its plural, mēnses, supplies menses, “menstrual periods, menstrual flow,” on account of the fact that menstruation occurs approximately at monthly intervals.

The Latin mēnsis formed menstruum (“menses”), from which English derives menstrual, menstruation, and related terminology.

“That time of the month”? An ill-advisedly uttered and sometimes sexistly deployed—if etymologically accurate—euphemism for periods.

Beyond “measure”

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *mē– doesn’t just mean “to measure.” It’s also the base unit of that word.

The PIE *mē- was converted into the Latin mētīrī, which morphed, through various forms and French, into the English measure. Such words as commensurate, dimension, and immense also trace back to mētīrī.

In Greek, the PIE *mē- became μέτρον (métron), source of meter in its senses of “poetic rhythm” and  “unit of length.”

The Greek métron (poetic meter, measure, rule, length, size) features in many derivatives, including diameter, geometry, metronome, symmetry, and countless scientific terms ending in –meter (e.g., kilometer) and –metry (e.g., telemetry).

***

How do we measure our days and distances? Our bodies and ambitions?

In meals and months. In meters and menses. 

In moons.

We could even say we measure them moonmeal.

“For human beings originally began philosophy … because of wonder,” Aristotle observed.

The roots of the word moon touch us at our very roots.

And because of that wonder, that wonder that is the measure of our humanity, we, in historic missions like Artemis II, have—wondrously—touched the moon back.

Aftermash

Sublunary: “of, in, or belonging to this world; earthly, terrestrial.”

So the OED defines this adjective whose associations I cannot extricate from John Donne’s immortal verses in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

As my Norton Anthology of Poetry—the ample volume I have retained since I was an English major many moons ago precisely for meals, if you will, like these—further glosses sublunary in its printing of the poem: “Beneath the moon; earthly, hence changeable.”

Changeable, unlike Donne’s parting couples’s “two souls therefore, which are one.”

(Perhaps man and moon are also in their way one, like Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “pallid, faithful Moon” in her celestial poem “A Solar Eclipse,” which “has been the one / Companion of the Earth.”)

Sublunary is indeed literally “beneath the moon,” combining the Latin sub-, “under,” and luna, “moon.”

The Latin luna is lassoed ‘round the PIE *leuk-, meaning “light,” as are illuminate, lucid, luminous, lunatic, luster, and many more Latin-limbed words.

The English light shines on, too, from the root.