Word.ws English Dictionary

howl at the moon

howl at the moon verb: to spend considerable time and effort fruitlessly in a hopeless endeavor.

Verb

howl at the moon (third-person singular simple present howls at the moon, present participle howling at the moon, simple past and past participle howled at the moon)

  1. (idiomatic) To spend considerable time and effort fruitlessly in a hopeless endeavor.

Forms of howl at the moon

third-person singular presenthowls at the moon
present participlehowling at the moon
past participlehowled at the moon
pasthowled at the moon

Origin of howl at the moon

After the stereotypical behaviour of wolves howling at the moon in folklore.

Questions about howl at the moon

What does howl at the moon mean?
Howl at the moon means to spend considerable time and effort fruitlessly in a hopeless endeavor.
What part of speech is howl at the moon?
Howl at the moon is a verb.
What is the past tense of howl at the moon?
The past tense of howl at the moon is howled at the moon.

Words near howl at the moon in the dictionary

  1. howkers
  2. howking
  3. Howkins
  4. howks
  5. howl
  6. howl at the moon
  7. howl down
  8. howl on
  9. howl out
  10. howl-round
  11. howlable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: howl at 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: “howl at the moon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/howl_at_the_moon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.