Other forms: moulting, moults, moulted
To moult is to shed an outgrown shell or skin. Moult in the autumn.
A bird moults its feathers and a crab its whole shell, which leaves it soft and defenceless. Anything about to moult stops eating for a while, which is how keepers know.
1verbmoultTo shed an outgrown shell or skin.
“The bird would moult every August and look ragged for a month.”
moult is a shedding.
Middle English mouten comes from Latin mutare, to change; the l was added later by mistake.
Proto-Indo-European
*mey- (change)
Latin
mūtō — to (re)move, change, vary, mutate, exchange, abandon
Old English
*mutian
Middle English
mouten
English, today
moult
From Middle English mouten, from Old English mutian (attested in bemutian, “to exchange for”), from Latin mūtō (“to (re)move, change, vary, mutate, exchange, abandon”). a doublet of mute and mutate. The unetymological ⟨l⟩ was introduced into the spelling by mistakenly assuming a French origin with -l- as in fault and vault; compare solder, which in contrast has an etymological ⟨l⟩ (from solidāre, “to make solid“) but was historically pronounced without that grapheme's sound.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA