mooncalf
Americannoun
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mooncalves
plural
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a congenitally grossly deformed and mentally defective person.
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a foolish person.
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a person who spends time idly daydreaming.
noun
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a born fool; dolt
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a person who idles time away
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obsolete a freak or monster
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of mooncalf
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The long-term effects of that mooncalf renaissance are impossible to gauge from here.
From Salon ● Jun. 6, 2021
Prince Bumpo, the heir to the throne, is a mooncalf who mistakes fairy tales for real life, speaks in Elizabethan periphrasis and murmurs to himself: “If only I were a white prince!”
From New York Times ● Sep. 9, 2020
By 1752, Dr. Johnson had begun to mock such reaching and its mooncalf hyperbole.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 3, 2016
In James Mangold's Heavy, she is a waitress at an upstate New York diner, and the cow-size chef gets mooncalf eyes at her approach.
From Time Magazine Archive
He stared off into space with a dumb mooncalf look on his face that made you want to slap him.
From "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly
And at the immediate mouth of the tunnel was a wide trampled space where the mooncalves had come and gone.
From The First Men in the Moon by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
I could see no signs of mooncalves or Selenites, nor could I see Cavor, but I could see my handkerchief far off, spread out on its thicket of thorns.
From The First Men in the Moon by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
He takes at last no interest in the deeper part of the moon; he regards all Selenites not equally versed in mooncalves with indifference, derision, or hostility.
From The First Men in the Moon by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
I think I forgot the Selenites, the mooncalves, the lid, and the noises completely so soon as I had eaten that fungus.
From The First Men in the Moon by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
Education contains much moonshine; but not of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a silver magnet, the one eye of the world.
From What's Wrong with the World by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
