man in the moon
3
6.7
- noun
- /mæn ɪn ðə muːn/
- Literature
:
hombre en la luna
- When I was a child, I would often imagine a man in the moon smiling down at me.
Examples
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For the better part of an hour, she watched the world outside from a sideways angle, then up and down, shifting, fastening her eyes on the man in the moon when she could see him.
Fiction book (1993) -
Man in the moon big and close, like he was tilting his head for a peek down into the convertible.
Fiction book (2002) -
Find if there is a man in the moon.
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But you can see the man in the moon really good tonight!
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I dreamed that the man in the moon was laughing at me.
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That's too much to ask, even from the man in the moon.
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"Where's the man in the moon?"
Fiction book (1990) -
"He didn't know any more about freezing things than the man in the moon," she said.
Fiction book (1992) -
An old Greek astronomer said that when the man in the moon is smiling, all the stars and planets are swinging.
-
Mare Imbrium, which makes up the right eye of the man in the moon, is 725 miles across.
Academic text (2003)
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is a direct, literal composition of 'man' + 'in' + 'moon' describing an imagined human-shaped figure seen on the moon's surface; this sense is easily inferred from the constituent words and standard locative composition. Cross-linguistic equivalents (e.g., Spanish 'hombre en la luna', French 'l'homme dans la lune') make the concept familiar, so a B1 learner who knows the parts will likely understand it.
Etymology
Man in the moon comes from people seeing spots and dark areas on the moon that look like a face. Long ago, storytellers imagined a man in the moon, so the phrase now means the 'figure' people say they can see on the moon.