What are the full Moon names?

Each month of the year has a traditional name for its full Moon. The list runs in calendar order. It starts with the Wolf Moon and ends with the Cold Moon. Every name is a label rather than a fixed day. This page keeps the sky and the folklore apart, so the times can be checked while the names are read as stories people kept.

Counting from 19 Oct 2026, the first full Moon is the one of 26 Oct 2026, 04:12 UTC. It falls in Taurus and carries the name Hunter's Moon. The computed table lists the other names with their own dates. Times here are in UTC, so a viewer farther west may see the Moon rise the evening before the listed date.

Many of the names reached us through almanacs and everyday speech. Households that lived by the seasons watched the full Moon. They used it to judge how late the light would last, when the ground would freeze and when the work was heaviest. The names grew out of those jobs. The Wolf Moon is said in tradition to match the packs that came close to villages in the deepest northern winter. The Worm Moon matches the soil softening as earthworms return in a northern spring.

The Strawberry Moon, in the same tradition, marks the short season when wild berries ripen in early northern summer. The Harvest Moon and the Hunter's Moon belong to the autumn work of gathering in crops, and then of hunting before the ground hardened. Those accounts are told in many places, and none of them records a single origin.

These explanations are tradition, not records of who coined a name or when it first appeared. Most of the names cannot be traced to one source. They moved through almanacs, farm calendars and everyday speech, and the same full Moon could carry two or three names depending on where it was spoken. A reader who meets a different name for a familiar Moon has not met an error. The tradition simply took a different path in that place.

The Harvest Moon is picked by a rule. This page states that rule for 2027 in one sentence. In 2027 the Harvest Moon is the full Moon of 15 Sep 2027, the one nearest the September equinox of 23 Sep 2027. The next full Moon, on 15 Oct 2027, is the Hunter's Moon. The date therefore moves from year to year. Check the date given here, not a memory of an earlier year. Some traditions use Corn Moon for the Harvest Moon itself. Here it is the September full Moon in years when the Harvest Moon falls in October. The computed example reads Corn Moon on 3 Sep 2028, 23:48 UTC.

The Blue Moon is a separate case, and this page takes its meaning only from the computed statements here. A Blue Moon here is the second full Moon in one calendar month, counted in New York time. The next Blue Moon is the full Moon of 31 Dec 2028, in Cancer. Some almanacs use an older, seasonal definition: the third full Moon in a season that has four. This page does not compute it.

The table on this page is computed from the sky rather than typed by hand. Each row gives a name, its usual month, the date and UTC time of that full Moon, and the zodiac sign the Moon is in. Local clocks differ from UTC, so a time just after midnight there can still be the previous evening in the Americas.

The names follow calendar months. The Moon follows a cycle shorter than most of them. The timing of full Moons therefore shifts against the calendar over a year. For a fuller account of the monthly round, the lunation page explains the cycle, and the ecliptic page explains the path the Moon takes across the sky.

Traditional names remain useful as a way to mark the year. A reader who wants a closer look at one evening can use the moon sign calculator. The zodiac dates page lists the day each sign starts and ends. Hold the names lightly. A name tells you what a community paid attention to, and it can be enjoyed as folklore while the timing is checked against the table.