Word.ws English Dictionary

lunar hay fever

lunar hay fever noun: a condition caused by irritation to the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs, from exposure to highly abrasive lunar dust.

Noun

lunar hay fever (uncountable)

  1. (informal, Apollo Program) A condition caused by irritation to the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs, from exposure to highly abrasive lunar dust.

Origin of lunar hay fever

From lunar + hay fever. From having symptoms like hay fever, but occurring due to encounters with lunar contaminants. Coined by Harrison Schmitt in 1972, Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist, to describe the condition already previously encountered by earlier crews, and by his crew.

Questions about lunar hay fever

What does lunar hay fever mean?
Lunar hay fever means a condition caused by irritation to the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs, from exposure to highly abrasive lunar dust.
What part of speech is lunar hay fever?
Lunar hay fever is a noun.

Words near lunar hay fever in the dictionary

  1. lunar deity
  2. lunar distance
  3. lunar distances
  4. lunar eclipse
  5. lunar eclipses
  6. lunar hay fever
  7. lunar letter
  8. lunar letters
  9. lunar lifeboat
  10. lunar lifeboats
  11. lunar mansion

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lunar hay fever (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: “lunar hay fever.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lunar_hay_fever. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.