A foolish or absent-minded person. The gentle modern meaning of a word that began, in the 1560s, as a term for a shapeless growth blamed on the moon.
What it really means
A mooncalf today is a dreamy, foolish, head-in-the-clouds person — the kind of word you might use of someone who forgot where they left their keys. The history is considerably darker, and worth knowing before you use it.
The word begins in the 1560s, not as an insult but as a description of something medical: an abortive, shapeless, fleshy mass, blamed on the influence of the moon. Halliwell quotes the lexicographer Randle Cotgrave describing it as a hard swelling or shapelesse peece of flesh in the wombe. The moon was thought to cause it; the calf was its offspring. That is the whole name.
From there it widened to mean a monster. That is the sense Shakespeare uses in The Tempest, where the drunken Stephano, finding Caliban, calls him a moon-calf.
By the 1620s it had become a cruel word for a person with an intellectual disability — and that is the insult these lists have quietly softened into absent-minded.
The soft modern meaning is real and harmless. It just stands on top of four centuries in which the word meant something much harder.
Where it comes from
The moon was thought to cause the thing, which is the whole of the name.
Myths & misconceptions
Mooncalf has always meant a dreamy, absent-minded person.
That is a much later, softened sense. It began in the 1560s as a word for a shapeless growth attributed to the moon, then a monster, and by the 1620s was used cruelly of people with intellectual disabilities.
How it connects
- Bedswerverthe other Shakespeare word on the list.
- Ragamuffinanother word that began as something monstrous and ended up mild.
Questions people ask
- Is mooncalf from Shakespeare?
- Shakespeare used it — in The Tempest, Stephano calls Caliban a 'moon-calf' — but it is older. It is recorded from the 1560s.
- Why moon?
- The original mooncalf was a shapeless growth that people believed the moon had caused.