💭 Romantic longing 🍑 Showing bare bottom 💭 To daydream

mooning

1 7.0

A dreamy longing for someone you love or like

noun
/ˈmuːnɪŋ/

: ensoñación

I wouldn't trade it for all the Niagara Falls mooning and spooning in the world.

Examples

Maribeth is a homely, sincere girl who glides around mooning, pining, and reading bad poetry chapbooks.

Fiction book (1992)
And it doubles as self-parody; this is what obsessive message-board moms think of their own carping and mooning.

Blog text (28)
All this mooning around over a damn sailor she hasn't heard from in almost two years, it's unnatural.

Hawaii (1966)
And so he has given up on love, the daydreams, the hope, the mooning about, the unsightly chase, and precipitous rejections.

Fiction book (2000)
Also, it's been years since her indiscretion, and Will hasn't exactly proven that he's worth all of Mac's mooning.

Blog text (11)
He observed my miserable moonings, my falling into adoration frequently followed by dejection, with ironic concern.

Fiction book (1997)
She spent the afternoon mooning over old love letters, lost in a dreamy trance.
As he lay on the grass, he started mooning about his crush, imagining romantic scenarios.
After weeks of mooning over him, she finally confessed her feelings during a quiet walk.

Antonyms

indifference

71 4.6

Lack of interest or concern about something

disinterest

5 5.8

Not feeling interested in something, like a talk or task

How Longing

obsession

262 5.1

yearning

8 5.5

mooning

1 7.0

fondness

38 2.8

liking

1 1.0

Surface Forms

mooning singular

moonings plural

Morphology

mooning = moon (semi-transparent) = moon + ing

The word is transparently formed from the verb 'moon' plus '-ing', but the romantic yearning sense is somewhat idiomatic and not fully predictable from the literal celestial noun.

Etymology

Mooning comes from being moony, which is like being under the moon and feeling 'dreamy' or lovesick. So to be mooning over someone is to be lost in romantic daydreams.