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moonshine

noun
/ˈmuːnʃaɪn/

Etymology

From Middle English mone schyne, mone-schyne, moone shone; equivalent to moon + shine. Illegally distilled liquor is so named because its manufacture may be conducted without artificial light at night. The verb sense is a back-formation from moonshiner.

  1. inherited from mone schyne

Definitions

  1. The light of the moon.

    • […] her Waggon Spokes made of long Spinners legs: the Couer of the wings of Graſhoppers, her Traces of the ſmalleſt Spiders web, her coullers of the Moonſhines watry Beames […]

  2. High-proof alcohol (especially whiskey) that is often, but not always, produced illegally.

    • They watered down the moonshine.
    • “Wish I'd been more polite to that girl,” the sheriff remarked regretfully. […] I know she’d have give me another drink of that old moonshine she has.”
    • My great grandpa was a blues lover / He'd be rockin' his moonshine to B.B. King and Jimmy Reed

  3. Smuggled spirits, often with a specific sense

    Smuggled spirits, often with a specific sense; (Kent, Sussex) white brandy; (Yorkshire) gin.

  4. ›+ 6 more definitions

    1. Nonsense.

      • He was talking moonshine.
      • “[…] But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? Suppose you had decided to follow Snowball, with his moonshine of windmills—Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal?”

    2. A branch of pure mathematics relating the Monster group to an invariant of elliptic…

      A branch of pure mathematics relating the Monster group to an invariant of elliptic functions.

    3. A spiced dish of eggs and fried onions.

    4. A month.

      • […] wherefore ſhould I / Stand in the plague of cuſtome, and permit / The curioſity of Nations to depriue me? / For that I am ſome twelue, or fourteene Moonſhines / Lag of a brother?

    5. To make homemade (especially, illicit) alcohol, especially distilled spirits.

      • His grandfather started to moonshine when things got really bad in 1933; when he got caught moonshining, he did a bit of time.

    6. To make (an ingredient) into such a drink.

      • A more practical critic notes that paleolithic man had a very sweet tooth, which he sated with honey. Worse, he moonshined the honey into metheglin, an alcoholic brew. Booze and junk food, in other words, are hardly modern inventions.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for moonshine. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA