Word.ws English Dictionary

asking for the moon

asking for the moon is the present participle and gerund of ask for the moon.

Meaning of ask for the moon

Verb

ask for the moon (third-person singular simple present asks for the moon, present participle asking for the moon, simple past and past participle asked for the moon)

  1. (idiomatic) To claim or desire something that one cannot have.
    • Major publishers think they are taking enough risk by simply publishing gay material. To want them to publish challenging, original gay books is asking them for the moon when they think they're already giving us the stars.1987 February 1, T. R. Witomski, “Zeitgeist or Poltergeist? Why Gay Books Are So Bad”, in Gay Community News, volume 14, number 28, page 8

Questions about asking for the moon

What is asking for the moon the present participle and gerund of?
Asking for the moon is the present participle and gerund of ask for the moon.

Words near asking for the moon in the dictionary

  1. asking back
  2. asking for
  3. asking for a friend
  4. asking for it
  5. asking for someone's hand in marriage
  6. asking for the moon
  7. asking for trouble
  8. asking how high when someone says jump
  9. asking in
  10. Asking Jeeves
  11. asking out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: asking for the moon (page history and authors); ask for the moon (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “asking for the moon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/asking_for_the_moon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.