Word.ws English Dictionary

mooning

mooning noun: the act of showing one's buttocks. Also the present participle and gerund of moon.

Noun

mooning (plural moonings)

  1. The act of showing one's buttocks.

Also used as

mooning is also the present participle and gerund of moon.

Forms of mooning

pluralmoonings

Origin of mooning

The usage of "mooning" to refer to the act reflected the use of "moon" as a metaphor for "the buttocks" since 1743. It was popularised from American student slang in the 1960s.

Questions about mooning

What does mooning mean?
Mooning means the act of showing one's buttocks.
What part of speech is mooning?
Mooning is a noun.
What is the plural of mooning?
The plural of mooning is moonings.

Words near mooning in the dictionary

  1. moonier
  2. moonies
  3. mooniest
  4. moonily
  5. mooniness
  6. mooning
  7. moonings
  8. moonish
  9. moonishly
  10. Moonite
  11. Moonites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mooning (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-mooning.wav.

Cite this entry: “mooning.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mooning. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.