I noticed recently that the moon is full (or just about full) making our back deck shine with brilliant light in the middle of the night.
At the same time a recent word newsletter from Collins Dictionary is full of “moon words”—so this seems like the right time to share them with you… although I must warn you, some of them are a bit weird.
A good example of a weird word is “apocynthian”—which is the point at which a spacecraft in lunar orbit is farthest from the moon: a word most of us are not going to need to use often, I would have thought.
But if it does crop up, here’s how to pronounce it—appoh-SIN-thian. It comes from Cynthia, the Latin goddess of the moon (there’s something else we’ve learned) with the prefix apo- meaning “away.”
Much easier to work out is “earthrise”—which works just like our familiar “sunrise.”
It’s when (for an astronaut standing on the moon, or a spacecraft orbiting the moon) the earth “rises” over the visible horizon.
A more interesting word is “plenilunar” which means “a full moon”—bringing us more or less circle back to where this ramble began.
So, you could, I suppose, call a night on which a full moon was expected a “plenilunar” night.
But according to the Oxford English Dictionary it can also be used metaphorically, so that anything that resembles a full moon can be called “plenilunar.”
I guess that means that the late comedian Benny Hill had a “plenilunar” face—as round as a full moon.
(You see the sort of stuff you get when the moonlight wakes me up in the middle of the night!)
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