Other forms: honeymooned, honeymooning
The honeymoon is the holiday a couple goes on straight after the wedding. Two suitcases, a hotel somewhere warm, and a week that is nobody else's business.
It works as a verb as well: they honeymooned in Sicily. Beyond weddings, a honeymoon is any short early stretch when everything is going well and nobody has started complaining — a new government's honeymoon, the honeymoon period in a job. When that stretch ends, the phrase is the honeymoon is over. Watch the spelling: one word, no hyphen. The hotel calls the couple honeymooners and charges them extra for the honeymoon suite.
1nounhoneymoonThe holiday a couple takes just after their wedding.~96%
“They spent their honeymoon walking in Norway.”
2nounshortA short early period when something new is going well and nobody criticises it.~2%
“The new manager's honeymoon lasted about three matches.”
3verbspendTo spend a honeymoon in a place.~2%
“They honeymooned in a cottage with no telephone in it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
honeymoon is a holiday.
The word was two words once: hony moone, honey and moon. The first idea was not sweet at all — affection was pictured waning like the moon after the wedding — and the meaning later turned into the first month of marriage, the sweetest one. Then the word travelled: French made lune de miel out of it, and German made Honigmond out of the French. Middle Low German had its own version, suckermânt, a sugar-month.
From earlier hony moone, originally denoting the period of time following a wedding, equivalent to honey + moon. The original reference was to affection waning like the moon, but later the sense became "the first month, or moon after marriage", which tends to be the sweetest. Compare Middle Low German suckermânt (“honeymoon”) literally “sugar-month”, German Low German Hönnigweken (“honeymoon”) literally “honey-weeks”. The German Honigmond literally “honey-moon” is a calque of French lune de miel, itself a calque of the English term.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA