moonshine

Etymology

From Middle English mone schyne, mone-schyne, moone shone; equivalent to moon + shine. Illegally distilled liquor is so named because its manufacture may be conducted without artificial light at night.

noun

1. (literally) The light of the moon.
   … the newes coming every moment of the growth of the fire; so as we were forced to begin to pack up our owne goods; and prepare for their removal; and did by moonshine (it being brave dry, and moonshine, and warm weather) carry much of my goods into the garden … 1666-09-02, Samuel Pepys, edited by Mynors Bright, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, London: George Bell & Sons, published 1893
   … O Nymph more bright than moon-ſhine night, like Kidlings blithe and merry … 1718, John Gay, “O ruddier than the Cherry”, from Act 2 of George Frideric Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea, page 47
   In mist or cloud on mast or shroud / It perch’d for vespers nine, / Whiles all the night thro’ fog smoke-white / Glimmer’d the white moon-shine. 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, in Lyrical Ballads, Part I, page 10
   So I came forth of the sea and sat down on the edge of an island in the moonshine, where a passer-by found me and, carrying me to the his house, besought me of love-liesse; but I smote him on the head, so that he all but died; whereupon he carried me forth and sold me to the merchant from whom thou hadst me, … 1885, Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
   … it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? … 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery, chapter 2, in Anne of Green Gables
2. (informal) High-proof alcohol (especially whiskey) that is often, but not always, produced illegally.
   They watered down the moonshine.
   “Wish I'd been more polite to that girl,” the sheriff remarked regretfully. … I know she’d have give me another drink of that old moonshine she has.” 1920, Peter B. Kyne, chapter IV, in The Understanding Heart
   My great grandpa was a blues lover / He'd be rockin' his moonshine to B.B. King and Jimmy Reed 1974, Betty Davis (lyrics and music), “They Say I'm Different”, performed by Betty Davis
3. (colloquial) Nonsense.
   He was talking moonshine.
   … But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? Suppose you had decided to follow Snowball, with his moonshine of windmills—Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal? 1945, George Orwell, chapter 5, in Animal Farm
   We forget what we have learned in the last 60 years. At university I once asked one of my lecturers why he was not talking to us about continental drift and I was told, sneeringly, that if I could I prove there was a force that could move continents, then he might think about it. The idea was moonshine, I was informed. 28 October 2012, Robin McKie, “David Attenborough: force of nature”, in The Observer, retrieved 2012-10-29
4. (mathematics) A branch of pure mathematics relating the Monster group to an invariant of elliptic functions.
5. (US, cooking) A spiced dish of eggs and fried onions.
6. (obsolete) A month.