moon [OE] The words moon, *month, and measure [ME] all go back to the same ancient root. Since the earliest times people have looked at the full moon and seen a face or figure there, which has been identified as the man in the moon since the Middle Ages. The patterns on the moon’s disc were formerly also seen as a man leaning on a fork and carrying a bundle of sticks or as a man with his dog and a thorn bush, while other cultures have seen a rabbit, hare, frog, or other animal. The expression over the moon, ‘extremely happy’, goes back to the early 18th century. The origins of it lie in a nursery rhyme beginning ‘Hey diddle diddle, / The cat and the fiddle, / The cow jumped over the moon’. The distance and unattainability of the moon is behind such phrases as to cry for the moon [M16th] ‘to ask for what is impossible or unattainable’ and to promise someone the moon [M19th]. For a dog to bark at the moon is a singularly pointless act, and people have used it to express futility since the mid 17th century. See also blue.