different between moonbeam vs moonshine

English

Etymology

In William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream 1590. Compound of moon +? beam.

Pronunciation

• (US) enPR: mo?on'b?m, IPA^(key): /?mun.bim/

Noun

moonbeam (plural moonbeams)

1. A shaft of moonlight.
2. Moonlight generally.
3. Any of various Australasian lycaenid butterflies of the genus Philiris.
4. (definition needed)
   • 1980: Pauline Kael in The New Yorker

     While you're responding to the dithering confusing Lynda is causing in the bus depot, you're absorbing the emotions between mother and child. Darcy is often very grownup around her mother, as if she knew that Lynda is a bit of a moonbeam and needs looking after.

Synonyms

• moon ray

Translations

See also

• sunbeam

References

English

Etymology

moon +? shine. Illegally distilled liquor is so named because its manufacture may be conducted without artificial light at night-time.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?mu?n?a?n/
• Hyphenation: moon?shine

Noun

moonshine (countable and uncountable, plural moonshines)

1. (literally) The light of the moon.

   Synonyms: moonlight, moonbeam

   • 1718, John Gay, “O ruddier than the Cherry”, from Act 2 of George Frideric Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea, page 47:

     [...] O Nymph more bright than moon-?hine night, like Kidlings blithe and merry [...]

   • 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Lyrical Ballads, Part I, page 10:

     In mist or cloud on mast or shroud / It perch’d for vespers nine, / Whiles all the night thro’ fog smoke-white / Glimmer’d the white moon-shine.

   • 1885, Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night:

     So I came forth of the sea and sat down on the edge of an island in the moonshine, where a passer-by found me and, carrying me to the his house, besought me of love-liesse; but I smote him on the head, so that he all but died; whereupon he carried me forth and sold me to the merchant from whom thou hadst me, [...]

   • 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Chapter 2,^[2]

     “[...] it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? [...]”

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

   Synonyms: bathtub gin, bootleg, corn liquor, hooch, mountain dew, white lightning, coon-dick, coondick

   • 1920, Peter B. Kyne, The Understanding Heart, Chapter IV

     “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.”
3. (colloquial) Nonsense.
4. (mathematics) A branch of pure mathematics relating the Monster group to an invariant of elliptic functions.
5. (US, cooking) A spiced dish of eggs and fried onions.
6. (obsolete) A month.

Derived terms

• eggs in moonshine
• Mathieu moonshine
• monstrous moonshine
• moonshiney, moonshiny
• umbral moonshine

Translations

Further reading

• moonshine at OneLook Dictionary Search

Portuguese

Noun

moonshine m (uncountable)

1. (rare) moonshine (Appalachian home-made liquor)