mooncalf


Also found in: Thesaurus, Wikipedia.

moon·calf

 (mo͞on′kăf′, -käf′)
n.
1. A fool.
2. A freak.

[Earlier, unformed embryo (from the supposed influence of the moon).]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

mooncalf

(ˈmuːnˌkɑːf)
n, pl -calves (-ˌkɑːvz)
1. a born fool; dolt
2. a person who idles time away
3. obsolete a freak or monster
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

moon•calf

(ˈmunˌkæf, -ˌkɑf)

n., pl. -calves.
a foolish person.
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

mooncalf

noun
One deficient in judgment and good sense:
Informal: dope, gander, goose.
The American Heritage® Roget's Thesaurus. Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
She coaches her terrified employee, Mooncalf, to pad her profits for her beer and bottle ale: 'I ha' told you the ways how to raise it: froth your cans well i'the filling, at length, rouge, and jog your bottles o' the buttock, sirrah, then skink out the first glass, ever and drink with all companies, though you be sure to be drunk; you'll misreckon the better and be less ashamed on't' (2.2.97-104).
Immediately on her entrance, she calls out to her tapster Mooncalf for "My chayre, you false faucet you; and my mornings draught, quickly, a botle of Ale, to quench mee, Rascall" (D1v; 2.2.41-42).
As for the maturation narrative, "adolescence" is a misleadingly trivializing middle term, since self-consciousness, in Hartman's account, has nothing to do with mooncalf self-absorption and bears rather on the very possibility of self-knowledge.
The book is perhaps too odd to ever quite be a classic, but in any sane literary firmament it would count as a major mooncalf anticlassic.
"I played Caliban [the play's 'mooncalf' monster] and wore a sack," she remembers in mock horror.
THE MOONCALF I met a bumpkin on a bench, set by the beck-side's edge, Where loose-limbed lovers tickle trout and water wagtails fledge, His beard was flecked with spider's web, and little bits of straw, And on his face he bore the scars of 90 years or more.
mooncalf? Can he vent [shit] Trinculos?" Stupidity and cupidity,
Isn't there a sensible woman - probably a farmer's daughter in his rural Welsh constituency - who can bring the mooncalf Member down to earth?
Gallic helmer Claude Mourieras, now better known for such well-groomed domestic dramas as "Everything's Fine" and "Mooncalf," returns to his docu roots with the powerful, verite-style "The Zartale Women's Journey." Pic exposes culture clash between secular and theocratic ways of life when villagers from Zartale, Afghanistan, go to a hospital in Chagheharan for medical treatment.
Animals of literally all kinds are put together: the expected unicorns and dragons (the latter, evidently among the writer's favorites, are even carefully classified and divided into ten subspecies), the classical chimaera and sphinx and a would-be classical new entry such as the acromantula, animals deriving from local folk-lore such as the pixie, the mooncalf, the kelpie and the leprechaun, and a number of animals invented for the occasion: among the most notable instances we find the dugbog, the pogrebin, the bowtruckle, and the lobalug.