The names of the full moons

Every month, a headline announces a Wolf Moon, a Strawberry Moon or a Harvest Moon, usually followed by the words “an old Native American name”. The real story is more tangled, and more interesting.

What the almanacs say

The two American almanacs behind the familiar list do not tell it the same way. The Farmers’ Almanac, published in Maine, writes that the names go back to Native American peoples, especially the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Northeast, that European settlers took up the custom, and that almanacs have printed the names since the 1930s.¹

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is more careful. It says its names come from Native American, Colonial American and other North American sources, and that each name usually belonged to a whole lunar month, not to the single night of the full moon.² It even notes that January’s Wolf Moon is not a traditional Native American name: it probably came from England with the settlers.³

So the list we read today is a modern compilation. It gathers words from several peoples and traditions, keeps one per month, and prints them in one tidy table.

The oldest printed list

One of the earliest printed sources is a travel book. Jonathan Carver, a captain of provincial troops in the war with France, travelled through the interior of North America from 1766 to 1768 and published his Travels in London in 1778.⁴

He wrote that some of the peoples he met counted their years by moons: twelve lunar months, and, after thirty moons had waned, an extra one they called the “lost moon”, before starting again. They gave every month a name that described its season.⁵

His list starts in March, because, he says, their year generally began at the first new moon after the spring equinox. March was the Worm Moon, when worms leave the bark of trees. Then came the months of Plants and of Flowers, the Hot Moon, the Buck Moon, the Sturgeon Moon (when that fish was caught in great numbers), the Corn Moon, the Travelling Moon (when villages left for their winter hunting grounds), the Beaver Moon, the Hunting Moon, the Cold Moon and the Snow Moon.⁶

Several of today’s names are already there: Worm, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Beaver, Cold and Snow. Others, like Wolf or Strawberry, are not in his list.⁶

What we can say, and what we cannot

Carver’s list is an outsider’s translation, written in English for European readers, and it does not say which people used which word.⁶ The almanacs, for their part, mix names from many peoples with names the settlers brought.²³

What is attested: in the eighteenth century, names of lunar months tied to the seasons were recorded in North America, and some of them match the names printed today. What is not attested: one single “Native American calendar” of twelve full-moon names. That table is the almanacs’ work.

The Harvest Moon

One name is set by the sky rather than by a tradition. In the tradition that The Old Farmer’s Almanac follows, the Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the September equinox, whatever the month it falls in.⁷