Word.ws English Dictionary

moonbird

moonbird noun: the mutton bird.

Noun

moonbird (plural moonbirds)

  1. (Australia) The mutton bird.
    • He survived for several months upon the moonbirds’ fatty mutton-like meat & the solace provided by the one book washed up with him […].2001, Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish, Vintage, published 2016, page 167

Forms of moonbird

pluralmoonbirds

Origin of moonbird

From moon + bird, apparently because the birds return to nesting sites after nightfall.

Questions about moonbird

What does moonbird mean?
Moonbird means the mutton bird.
What part of speech is moonbird?
Moonbird is a noun.
What is the plural of moonbird?
The plural of moonbird is moonbirds.

Words near moonbird in the dictionary

  1. moonbeam
  2. moonbeams
  3. moonbear
  4. moonbears
  5. Moonbi
  6. moonbird
  7. moonbirds
  8. moonblind
  9. moonblink
  10. moonblood
  11. moonboot

Source and license

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