The origin of the word 'honeymoon' is shrouded in a 500-year-old literary hoax
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After getting married, couples tend to take a vacation. Honeymoons are a way for couples to focus on spending time with each other, leaving the rest of the world behind.
But why on Earth is it called a "honeymoon"? What exactly does it have to do with honey and moons? And when did this whole tradition start, anyway?
The best place to look is the Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks how words have been used over the centuries. The history of the word "honeymoon," it turns out, is at the end of an etymological rabbit hole.
At first, it didn't even necessarily refer to a vacation.
The origin of the word is shrouded in a mysterious literary hoax.
The first use of the phrase wasn't exactly connected to the word's current usage. It appears in a volume titled (get ready for this): "A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue compacte in a matter concernyng two maner of mariages, made and set foorth," published in 1546 and written by the playwright and poet John Heywood, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It's in a poem where the speaker talks about love and art, where Heywood uses the phrase "it was yet but hony moone" to signal a feeling of merryment.
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The next usage of "honeymoon," in 1592, is more precisely attuned to how we use the word "honeymoon" today. But it appeared in a very strange document that may have been a literary hoax.
Robert Greene, another British dramatist, is most famous for the publication attributed to him right after he died, in 1592. Ostensibly, his last work was "Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance," a semiautobiographical tract about the importance of living a moral life. It was a sensation in the London world of letters at the time, partly for including a thinly veiled attack on the works of William Shakespeare. (That you've heard of Shakespeare but probably haven't heard of Greene is enough to settle the dispute.)
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But there's a cloud of uncertainty around the book. It's not clear if Greene wrote the whole thing himself, or if it's partly the work of his fellow writer Henry Chettle. To make matters even more confusing, a slew of other semiautobiograohical tracts of Robert Greene's life and death appeared, all claiming to be written by Greene himself.
One of these works, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the source of the contemporary use of "honeymoon." It's in a version of Greene's death story titled "Greene's Vision: Written at the instant of his death. Conteyning a penitent passion for the folly of his Pen."
In the narrative, the word appears after two people get married. "To be bréefe, they were marryed: well that daye was past with dauncing and Honney moone it was for a moneth after." In other words, two people got married and then spent time with each other for a month.
The usage explains what the word actually means. "Honey," because it's a sweet period of time. And "moon" because it takes a month for the moon to wane and wax anew. It also alludes to love waning steadily, as the moon does, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The subsequent uses of the word "honeymoon" all basically translate to "a happy period of time following a marriage."
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By the end of the 1500s, the word also referred to a similar experience in a political context, meaning a short-lived period of goodwill that exists before a relationship turns bad. Take, for example, a series of lectures about British statesmen by Goldwin Smith from 1867, where he refers to "the brief honeymoon of the new king and his parliament," a moment before Parlimentarian John Pym hadn't yet decided that Charles I should be arrested.
It wasn't for another 200 years that the honeymoon became a vacation.
The word started referring to a deliberate vacation only in 1791.
That usage first appears in a collection of German folk stories by Johann Karl August Musäus, translated by Thomas Beddoes, according to the Oxford English dictionary.
"The new-married couple spent their honey-moon in Augspurg, in mutual happiness and innocent enjoyments, like the first human pair in the garden of Eden," the sentence goes.
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The first native-English usage appeared in 1804, according to the dictionary, in another story collection, this one published in London and written by Maria Edgeworth.
"Mr. and Mrs. Ludgate went down in the hoy to Margate, to spend their honey-moon in style," she writes.
From then on, the usage of the word meant what it means today. By 1821, it acquired a verb form — "honeymooning" — and the noun even managed to grab a few other words that were commonly used alongside it, forming common phrases like "honeymoon couple," "honeymoon period," and "honeymoon suite."
"Honeymoon," like many words in the English language, has a surprising heritage. This one took 200 years to mean exactly what it does today.
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