mooncalf
Americannoun
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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
But Doinel, the eternal mooncalf, is lured away by a Japanese girl.
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
"They must think we are mooncalves," said I, "to be frightened at that."
From The First Men in the Moon by Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
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 Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
By contrast with the mooncalves he seemed a trivial being, a mere ant, scarcely five feet high.
From The First Men in the Moon by Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
When next we saw mooncalves they were some little distance away from us in a place of tumbled rocks.
From The First Men in the Moon by Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
You forget," he said, "that these mooncalves neither think nor reason.
From The Maid of Honour (Vol. 3 of 3) A Tale of the Dark Days of France by Wingfield, Lewis
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.
