Other forms: moonlighting, moonlighted, moonlights
Moonlight is the light the moon reflects at night. Walk by moonlight, bright moonlight, moonlight on the water.
It is sunlight bounced off a surface about as reflective as worn tarmac, and a full moon is some four hundred thousand times fainter than the sun. Colours vanish in it because the light is too weak for the eye's colour cells. To moonlight is to work a second job.
1nounmoonlightThe light the moon reflects at night.
“The lake shone silver in the moonlight.”
2verbworkTo work a second job.
“He teaches during the day and moonlights as a taxi driver at weekends.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
moonlight is light.
Moon plus light, recorded in Middle English. The verb meaning to work a second job came from doing it after dark.
Middle English
moonelight
English, today
moonlight
Built from
From Middle English moonelight. The is derived from Middle English moonelight,monelight,mone lyght (“light of the moon; (heraldry) pattern of moons on the field of a heraldic banner”), from mon, mone (“moon”) (from Old English mōna (“moon”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European mḗh₁n̥s (“moon; month”)) + light (“light”) (from Old English lēoht (“light”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European lewk- (“bright; to see; to shine”)). by surface analysis, moon + light. The is derived from the noun. to do a moonlight flit (“to secretly leave premises without paying the rent”) is a a back-formation from moonlight flit, while to make a night-time attack (“to make a night-time attack on a tenant farmer”) is probably a a back-formation from moonlighter.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA