MoonPhases

Nomenclature

Traditional Moon Names

Every full moon of the year carries a name. Some are genuinely ancient, some are eighteenth-century English, and some were popularised by an almanac in the 1930s. Here is where each one actually comes from.

A note on sources

These names are usually presented as “Native American moon names”. That is only partly true. The familiar list was published by the Maine Farmers’ Almanac in the 1930s and has been reprinted ever since; it mixes Algonquian names with Colonial American and English ones, and its attributions are largely unsourced. Individual nations kept their own lunar calendars, many of which did not align with Gregorian months at all. Where an origin is documented, the pages below say so. Where it is folklore, they say that too.