Full moon names

Where full moon names come from

The twelve names most Americans know are Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn or Harvest, Hunter’s, Beaver and Cold. They became familiar through almanacs. NASA’s former monthly moon guides say the Maine Farmers’ Almanac began publishing “Native American” names for the full moons in the 1930s, credited to the Algonquin tribes of the Northeast. The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a separate publication based in New Hampshire, describes its names as coming from Native American, colonial American and European sources. For several of them it cites the 1760s travel writing of the explorer Jonathan Carver.

So the list is a blend. Some names, such as Wolf Moon, are by the Old Farmer’s Almanac’s own account English in origin. Harvest Moon and Hunter’s Moon are assigned by a rule tied to the September equinox, not by month. Others were written down secondhand by colonial-era travelers such as Carver, or were attributed by almanacs to “Algonquin” peoples without saying which communities they meant.

Why there is no single “Native American” list

Many Indigenous nations kept their own calendars, in their own languages. Smithsonian Magazine quotes the authors of The Native American Almanac, Arlene Hirschfelder and Martha Kreipe de Montaño. They explain that moon names came from the local cycles of weather, plants and animals and varied from region to region. Indian Country Today (ICT), a Native-run news outlet, publishes separate month names for the Ojibwe, Diné (Navajo), Oneida, Dakota and Cherokee. It notes that names differ even between dialects of one language, and that traditional calendars marked thirteen moons, not twelve.

The differences are real. The 1890s Cherokee calendar cited by ICT calls March the Strawberry Moon. Ojibwe communities on either side of Lake Superior put the Maple Sugar Moon a month apart. Many names covered a whole lunar month, not one night.

On our pages, each name is credited to whoever makes the claim: the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the Farmers’ Almanac, NASA, or a Native source quoted by ICT. We don’t present almanac attributions as tribal fact.

What the pages show

Each name page lists the dates and Eastern Time of that full moon through 2030, the evening to watch it rise in major cities, and whether it counts as a supermoon, a micromoon or a Blue Moon. The rule-based moons have their own pages: the Harvest Moon, the Hunter’s Moon, the Blue Moon and the supermoon. For how the phases themselves work, see the Moon guide.