Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Moonlight.
- n. Informal Foolish talk or thought; nonsense.
- n. Illegally distilled whiskey. Also called regionally white lightning.
- v. To distill and sell liquor illegally.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The shining or light of the moon.
- n. Figuratively (as light without heat), show without substance or reality: pretense; empty show; fiction: as, that's all moonshine.
- n. A month.
- n. A dish of poached eggs served with a sauce.
- n. Smuggled spirits: so called as being brought in or taken away at night.
- Illuminated by the moon.
- Nocturnal.
- Empty; trivial.
Wiktionary
- n. literally The light of the moon; moonlight.
- n. Illegally distilled liquor, so named because much of the manufacturing process often is conducted without artificial light at night when the moon is shining.
- n. colloquial nonsense
- n. mathematics A branch of pure mathematics relating the monster group to an invariant of elliptic functions; see monstrous moonshine.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The light of the moon.
- n. Hence, show without substance or reality.
- n. rare A month.
- n. obsolete A preparation of eggs for food.
- n. Dial. Eng., & Colloq. or Slang, U. S. Liquor smuggled or illicitly distilled, especially liquor distilled illegally in rural parts of the southern U. S.
- adj. rare Moonlight.
- adj. Empty; trivial; idle.
- adj. Dial. Eng., & Colloq. or Slang, U. S. Designating, or pertaining to, illicit liquor.
WordNet 3.0
- n. whiskey illegally distilled from a corn mash
- v. distill (alcohol) illegally; produce moonshine
- n. the light of the Moon
Examples
“John Boy Walton --- stole moonshine from the Baldwin Sisters 'still.”
“A visit today to a United States District Court in most any section of the Blue Ridge Country where makers of illicit whiskey are being tried shows that the name moonshine no longer applies to the beverage.”
“It had also spawned an underground, tax-free trade in an illegal substance that would forever be known as moonshine, and a collection apparatus staffed by men from the Bureau of Internal Revenue who would forever be known as revenuers.”
“The skills required were not all that different from making moonshine, which is why whiskey makers went into oil refining in the nineteenth century.”
“It used to be called moonshine, now you probably call it white gold because the price of ethanol is going up, but causing some problems, too.”
“I recall the moonshine upon their faces, the swift dartings of their faintly luminous blades, their strangely altering shadows on the snow as they moved, the steady attention of us who looked on, the moan of the wind among the trees upon the neighbouring heights, the sound of the men's tramping on the crusted snow, the clear clink of their weapons, sometimes the noise of their breathing.”
“ROCKY MOUNT - Franklin County is known for its "white lightning" (aka moonshine), but the”
“This appalling, 30-proof abomination is neither moonshine, which is the clear, high-octane alcohol that screams off a homemade still -- nor, we're betting, does it contain any actual peach.”
“Possession of the moonshine is a Class 1 misdemeanor, the most serious kind of misdemeanor.”
“When you think that some people make illegal alcohol, otherwise known as moonshine which under current laws in your country is illegal, I would doubt very much that you would have a law in place saying you can't distill water, even Alex Jones promotes a home still to purify your water.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘moonshine’.
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EN - archaic words
abide, abjure, abroad, adamant, afield, aforetime, aghast, anon, apace, argent, assuage, aught and 328 more...
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UK Usage - Find US Equivalent
All these terms have a (different) American English equivalent. Wonder if you can identify them?
abridgement (abri..., accoutrement, accoutre, acknowledgement (..., opposite, advert, adaptor, adapter, sticking plaster, advertise, adviser (advisor ..., adze, aesthete and 1196 more...
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EN-HU - important words for a HU inte...
Words only (I left out the expressions) from Geza Kerenyi's EN-HU interpreters' dictionary. Most of them pose some difficulty when interpreted between HU and EN in either or both directions.
abalone, abrasive, abstractionist, abstruse, abysmal, academia, accessibility, accessible, acclimate, accolade, accompanist, achiever and 1469 more...
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Genes
Interesting gene names. Some of these may have changed recently (to something less offensive/funny).
http://www.genenames.org/
tinman, agnostic, dreadlocks, Van Gogh, fruitless, lava lamp, ariadne, cheap date, ken and barbie, I'm not dead yet, I'm not dead yet 2, manic fringe and 1192 more... -
Figuratively
Words with definitions containing "figuratively."
spore, plunge, fulminate, rasp, hinge, niche, breathe, approach, hammer, rain, butcher, dazzle and 132 more...
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EN - newSPEAK
Buzzwords of our time
actionable, administrivia, advermation, agreeance, backbone provider, back-sourcing, baked in, bandwidth, barn raising, Barneyware, belly-buttons, Below Zeros and 1078 more...
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WF - nominal compounds (figurative)
An extensive list I have been working on for quite some time. Feel free to add more of the kind if you miss any.
brainstorming, upside, downside, goldplating, bikeshedding, mudslinging, downgrading, headhunter, streamlining, mainstreaming, gerrymandering, frontloading and 503 more...
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ze list
favorites, of all sorts
obscure, pretentious, debacle, vintage, ostentatious, damsel, plethora, requiem, memoir, loathe, lackadaisical, misanthropic and 82 more...
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Nonsense
Words that mean (more or less) 'nonsense'
moonshine, tommyrot, rigmarole, hogwash, piffle, hokum, horsefeathers, codswallop, folderol, blatherskite, humbug, gammon and 1 more...
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Chit Chat
Conversations that are shorter than those featured in my conversations list.
props, frass, narwhal, preggers, mu, hype, heterotopia, sans serif, cow orker, snicker-snack, modality road, boolean poetry and 77 more...
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Trash Talk
Words that indicate meaningless, confusing or deceptive talk.
white noise, blarney, pidgin, jabber, bullshit, yadda yadda yadda, mishmash, farrago, gobbledygook, yammer, drivel, jargon and 18 more...
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capitalcreative's Words
deviltry, visceral, cassanova, assuage, genesis, hot minute, osmosis, wistful, sublime, loathe, farfetched, newfangled and 283 more...
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food words
weetabix, blancmange, shandy, meringue, allspice, pavlova, quiche, caster sugar, suet, moonshine, turnip, swede and 93 more...
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Amalgamations
Words that have been smashed together.
keystone, touchstone, footprint, thunderhead, seesaw, textbook, leftovers, watchword, afterbirth, fieldwork, outcast, statesman and 148 more...
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the first list
an immense, grandiloquent list that loads like a thousand years sentence in stone. new words are in the other lists.
ridiculous, brummagem, predicament, sanctimonious, vapid, eschew, admonish, auspicious, capitulation, enumerate, lachrymose, tenet and 1648 more...
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Junk
walrus, fascination, broadway, fickle, downturn, bridge, gargle, rotunda, mesh, fab, shortlife, strumming and 304 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for moonshine.
amcd56 more than you would think - a mathematical conjecture
http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-moo1.htm May 16, 2007
reesetee Wow. I feel deprived. No pockets of backwoods moonshiners around here that *I* know of.
I agree, though--great asides for a word I've always liked. :-) Mar 5, 2007
chained_bear There is a similar "pocket" of individuals, mostly members of a large extended family, around my neighborhood. That they are still making and selling moonshine was made public a year or so ago when it hit the newspapers that students of a local college were caught frequenting the out-of-the-way road to buy gallon jars of homemade liquor. There are still moonshiners out there, it's true. Mar 4, 2007
uselessness It's very true. Frighteningly so. Mar 4, 2007
abraxaszugzwang that's the best little aside I've read in a long time, true or not. Mar 4, 2007
uselessness Mmm, Mountain Dew.
Side note: There is a tiny, tiny little village in the heart of Florida's Ocala National Forest, called Scrambletown. You won't find it on any map. Scrambletown is a general store, junkyard, honey farm, and fundamentalist Baptist church, surrounded by mobile homes. The population, surely in the low triple-digits, consists mainly of two largish redneck families.
My family stumbled into Scrambletown in 2001. We were considered outcasts, city folk, and (to make matters worse) my mom wouldn't wear long dresses and my dad wouldn't join the local militia. Regardless, I lived there two years before moving away, and my family remained another year before they hit the road as well.
All this to say that Scrambletown's claim to "fame" is that it was a major production center for moonshine during the prohibition. Eventually, the feds came in to raid the place, and everybody scrambled. Hence the name. To this day, Scrambletown remains the nearly-invisible backwoods home of all manner of inbreds, outlaws, and card-carrying members of the KKK. They have withdrawn from society, and society has forgotten them. Mar 4, 2007
abraxaszugzwang Moonshine (sometimes known as Poteen, mooney, hooch, mountain dew, or white lightning) is a common slang term for home-distilled alcohol, especially in places where this production is illegal.
The name is often assumed to be derived from the fact that moonshine producers and smugglers would often work at night (i.e. under the light of the moon) to avoid arrest for producing illegal liquor. The 1811 edition of the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, originally by Francis Grose, defines "moonshine" as follows: "A matter or mouthful of moonshine; a trifle, nothing. The white brandy smuggled on the coasts of Kent and Sussex, and the gin in the north of Yorkshire, are also called moonshine." 1 It has been suggested that the term might derive from smugglers' explaining away their boxes and barrels as "mere moonshine" (that is, nothing). (Jonathon Green, American Dialect Society Mailing List, 31 Oct 2001)
The Armenian name for moonshine is aragh (the word comes from Arabic araq عرق, meaning "sweat" or "juice") Mar 4, 2007