Moonfall

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The occurrence or imagined event of the moon descending and colliding with the Earth or another body
2. An event or concept involving the moon dropping from its orbit and impacting a surface
3. The phenomenon or fictional idea of the moon moving out of its path to fall onto another object

Etymology: "Moonfall" is a plain compound: "moon" joined to "fall," the English noun from the verb "fall," which goes back to Old English "feallan" and means a descent or drop. The combination describes the moon coming down from the sky, and the word is one of many English compounds built this way on a single base noun. The second sense follows a different pattern. Astronautics borrowed the term on the model of "landfall," the nautical word for sighting land after a voyage, so that a moonfall is an arrival at the moon rather than a descent from it. Readers encountering the word in spacecraft contexts should therefore take it as a landing, while the older imaginative sense describes the moon itself dropping toward Earth.