The story goes like this. In northern Europe, newlyweds spent their first month of marriage drinking mead, a honey wine, for luck and fertility. A moon’s worth of honey liquor. Hence, honeymoon.

It’s a lovely image, and it turns up everywhere: wedding blogs, pub-quiz answer sheets, best men reaching for a line about the couple’s first month together.

It’s also doubtful. The earliest English uses point somewhere much less romantic. Not a toast, but a warning.

The mead story everyone repeats

You can see why the honey-wine version spread. It sounds old, it’s easy to picture, and it has the classic shape of a folk etymology: two familiar words, honey and moon, snapped together into a plausible custom.

The mead theory does have a paper trail, just not the one people think. Etymologist Anatoly Liberman notes the theory that newly married couples drank metheglin, or mead, for thirty days after their wedding.

But Liberman mentions it to knock it down. “However widespread this custom may have been in the north of Europe,” he writes, “it hardly gave rise to the word honeymoon in 16th-century England.”

What the earliest 1540s uses actually say

The Oxford English Dictionary dates its earliest evidence to 1546, in a work by playwright and epigrammatist John Heywood. Heywood describes a newly married couple who initially cannot look at each other without smiling, before their happiness quickly fades. His punchline is that it was “yet but hony moone.”

A few years later, in 1552, lexicographer Richard Huloet defined “hony mone” as a term for newlyweds who love one another intensely at first, with that excessive affection then appearing to subside.

“Moon” could also mean “month”; as Liberman notes, the two words are historically related. Honey naturally supplied the sweetness. But the early definitions also encouraged a darker interpretation: like a full moon, that sweetness would not remain at its peak.

By the seventeenth century that reading was explicit. Thomas Blount, in his 1656 Glossographia, defined the word as “hony-moon, applyed to those marryed persons that love well at first, and decline in affection afterwards; it is hony now, but it will change as the Moon.”

Not exactly a blessing. More a raised eyebrow at wedded bliss.

The colder reading: honey plus a waning moon

The traditional dictionary explanation therefore compares newlyweds’ affection with a moon that is full and then begins to wane. But even that explanation is not beyond dispute.

Liberman is doubtful. If the waning-moon explanation was already proverbial by 1552, he asks, why is the earlier evidence so thin? “Didn’t the witty Heywood coin honeymoon and Huloet repeat somebody’s joke? I am afraid he did,” he writes. His suggestion is that Heywood may simply have created a clever compound, honey plus moon meaning month, which later lexicographers interpreted as a comment on affection fading.

So the exact reasoning behind the coinage remains uncertain. What is much weaker is the popular mead explanation. The serious possibilities start with the ordinary meanings of the English words themselves: honey for sweetness, and moon either for a month or for something that waxes and wanes.

How the sweeter story won anyway

It’s easy to see why the mead version rules wedding blogs while the waning-moon reading sits quietly in etymology columns. A month of honey wine is a toast. A love that empties like the moon is a warning nobody wants to raise over the first dance.

The familiar holiday meaning came later. The use of “honeymoon” for a newly married couple’s trip is recorded from around 1800. A figurative sense appeared much earlier: a 1579 example describes a temporary period of favourable feeling as a “honiemoone awhile”. That makes sense without any mead at all. A political honeymoon is a period of goodwill precisely because everyone assumes it may not last.

Other languages later borrowed the image. Liberman notes that Voltaire used the French lune de miel in Zadig in 1747, while the English word predates it by roughly two centuries.

The colder history is also the more interesting one: an expression appearing in a comic writer’s work, explained by early lexicographers as a wry comment on affection cooling, and eventually softened into a word for a post-wedding holiday.