moonbeam

Noun

moonbeam (plural moonbeams)

1. A ray or shaft of moonlight.
   • Holonym: moonlight
   • Be kinde and curteous to this gentleman, / Hop in his walkes, and gambole in his eyes, / Feede him with Apricocks, and Dewberries, / With purple Grapes, greene figges, and Mulberries, / The hony bagges ſteale from the humble Bees, / And for night tapers, croppe their waxen thighes, / And light them...c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, A Midsommer Nights Dreame. […] (First Quarto), London: […] [Richard Bradock] for Thomas Fisher, […], published 1600, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]
2. Any of various Australasian lycaenid butterflies of the genus Philiris.
3. Someone who tends to be dreamy and prone to unrealistic romanticism.
   • While you're responding to the dithering confusing Lynda is causing in the bus depot, you're absorbing the emotions between mother and child. Darcy is often very grownup around her mother, as if she knew that Lynda is a bit of a moonbeam and needs looking after.1980, Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
   • Dreaming of the mountain was for moonbeams, he told me, not for people who had been born up there.2011, Tony D'Souza, Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight, page 280
4. A goal or aspiration that appears attractive but is ultimately insubstantial.
   • Therefore it has always seemed clear to me, and that has been the decision of the Senate for many years before when we have had these questions stoutly contested, that where the direction (which is legislation, of course, just as the appropriation is) is confined to the appropriation, to the...1882, United States. Congress, Congressional Record, page 3490
   • So much for moonbeams and politics.1968 July 12, William A. McWhirter, “Coalition against the Humphrey steamroller”, in LIFE