Wolf, Snow, Harvest: Every Full Moon Name and Where It Came From

Every month's full moon carries a name, and some of them — the Harvest Moon, the Wolf Moon, the Strawberry Moon — have become familiar enough to make the news each year. The names are evocative, they are widely repeated, and their actual history is a good deal messier than the tidy lists suggest.

Here is the full set, followed by an honest account of where they came from and which parts of the standard story do not survive contact with the sources.

The twelve names

• January — Wolf Moon. Named for wolves heard more often in midwinter, when sound carries and food is scarce.
• February — Snow Moon. Typically the heaviest snowfall month across much of North America. Sometimes called the Hunger Moon for the same reason.
• March — Worm Moon. For the earthworm casts that appear as the ground thaws. An alternative explanation points to beetle larvae emerging from thawing bark.
• April — Pink Moon. Not a description of the moon. See below.
• May — Flower Moon. The obvious one: peak spring flowering.
• June — Strawberry Moon. The short North American strawberry harvest, not the colour. In European traditions this one is often the Rose Moon or Mead Moon.
• July — Buck Moon. Male deer begin regrowing their antlers around now. Also called the Thunder Moon for midsummer storms.
• August — Sturgeon Moon. Named for the sturgeon of the Great Lakes, most readily caught at this point in the year.
• September — Corn Moon, or Harvest Moon in most years.
• October — Hunter's Moon, when game was fattened and the fields were cleared enough to see across.
• November — Beaver Moon, the season for setting beaver traps before the waterways froze.
• December — Cold Moon. Also the Long Night Moon, which is the better name — it falls near the winter solstice, so the moon is above the horizon for an unusually long stretch.

Where the names actually come from

Almost every list you will encounter, including this one, descends from the Old Farmer's Almanac, which has published a version of these names since the 1930s. The Almanac generally attributes them to Native American peoples, most often Algonquian-speaking nations of the north-eastern woodlands, with some Colonial American and European additions.

That attribution deserves a caveat, and it is not a small one. There was never a single agreed calendar of moon names. Different nations kept different names, tied to their own regions and seasonal cycles, and those cycles were tracked in ways that did not always map onto twelve Gregorian months. The Almanac list is a composite assembled by publishers, standardised for print, and it flattens a considerable diversity of practice into one tidy sequence. Several names in common circulation have uncertain provenance, and the tradition each is credited to varies between sources.

None of that makes the names not worth knowing. It is a reason to describe them as a popularised almanac tradition rather than as the authentic calendar of any particular people — and, if a specific name matters to you, a reason to look up the nation it is actually credited to rather than trusting the aggregate list.

The Pink Moon is not pink

This is the single most reliable annual disappointment in amateur astronomy. Every April, coverage of the Pink Moon prompts a great many people to look up at an entirely ordinary grey-white moon.

The name comes from a flower: Phlox subulata, commonly called moss pink or creeping phlox, one of the earliest widespread wildflowers of the North American spring. The moon has no April colouring of its own. It is worth saying that no full moon name refers to the moon's appearance — they are all names for what was happening on the ground.

The moon does genuinely change colour under two conditions, neither of them April-specific. Low on the horizon it reddens, for the same atmospheric reason sunsets do: you are looking through much more air, which scatters away the shorter blue wavelengths. And during a total lunar eclipse it can turn a deep coppery red, because the only sunlight reaching it has been bent through the whole ring of Earth's sunrises and sunsets at once.

The Harvest Moon breaks the pattern

Eleven of the twelve names are simply assigned to a month. The Harvest Moon is not. It is defined as the full moon falling nearest the autumn equinox, which means it usually lands in September but moves into early October roughly every three years. When that happens, September takes the Corn Moon name instead, and the Hunter's Moon shifts along behind it.

The Harvest Moon also has a real observable property behind the name, which most of the others do not, and it is genuinely worth understanding. On an average night the moon rises about fifty minutes later than the night before. Around the autumn equinox, in the northern hemisphere, the moon's path meets the horizon at an unusually shallow angle — so the delay shrinks to something like twenty-five or thirty minutes for several nights running.

The practical consequence, in the era before tractors had headlights, was significant: several consecutive evenings on which a bright moon rose around sunset, extending the working day at exactly the point in the year when the harvest had to be brought in. The name records a piece of agricultural infrastructure, not a sentiment.

What about a thirteenth full moon?

Twelve names, but the lunar cycle is 29.5 days and the solar year is 365. That mismatch means some years contain thirteen full moons, and the extra one has no name of its own — it is the blue moon. The commonly used modern definition is the second full moon within a single calendar month; the older seasonal definition is the third full moon in a season that contains four. Neither has anything to do with colour.

You may also see the term supermoon attached to particular full moons. That refers to the moon being near the closest point of its slightly elliptical orbit, making it appear modestly larger and brighter. It is a distance description rather than a name, and it can apply to any month's moon.

Using them

The names are most useful as a seasonal index. Taken in order they read as a calendar of what mattered to people living close to the land: what could be hunted, what was flowering, what was freezing, what needed bringing in. Read that way the Beaver Moon and the Hunger Moon tell you more about a November or a February than the month names do.

If you keep any kind of monthly practice, the names give each cycle a distinct character to write against, which is a good deal more interesting than numbering them. And if you want the European equivalents, they exist too — the Mead Moon, the Rose Moon, the Egg Moon — recording a different set of preoccupations in a different climate.