The Full Moon Names: A Month-by-Month Guide
Wolf Moon, Strawberry Moon, Hunter's Moon — where the traditional monthly moon names actually come from, and how practitioners use each one.
Alongside the eight phases tracked on this site's Moon Phases page, there's a second, older layer of lunar tradition: each month's full moon has its own name, tied to what was happening in nature or daily life around that point in the year. They're a nice second anchor for practice — a full moon in July doesn't feel or mean quite the same thing as one in December, and the names are a shorthand for that.
Where the names actually come from
This one's worth being straight about, because it's often presented as a single unbroken ancient tradition, and it isn't quite that. The names in wide use today are a blend: Indigenous naming traditions — especially from Algonquian-speaking peoples of the northeastern woodlands, who tracked seasonal change through the moon — colonial American adaptations, and later European folk names, all filtered through the almanac publishers (Farmers' Almanac among them) who started standardizing and printing these lists in the 1930s. Exact names varied a lot by nation, region, and era even before that. So when you see a slightly different name for the same month on a different site or in a different book, that's not an error — it reflects genuinely different regional traditions, not one of them being "correct."
The list below uses the naming set most common in modern Wiccan and pagan practice writing, alongside a few of the most frequently cited alternates.
Protection and quiet strength through the depth of winter — a good time to plan rather than act.
Weathering hardship and building resilience, timed to the harshest stretch of the cold season.
New beginnings and purification, as the ground starts to soften and thaw.
Fertility and forward motion — moving plans from idea into action.
Growth, romance, and health, as spring's early growth becomes visible.
Partnership and abundance, tied to early summer's first harvests.
Celebration and enchantment, marking the true start of the harvest season.
Herb-gathering and abundance (wyrt is Old English for “plant” or “herb”).
Protection, prosperity, and gratitude as the grain harvest comes in.
Reflection and reckoning — reviewing the year and preparing for winter.
Family, community, and gathering in as the cold deepens.
Rest, closure, and the promise of returning light after the solstice.
Once in a blue moon
A blue moon is a second full moon falling within the same calendar month — not a color change, just a quirk of the lunar cycle (about 29.5 days) not lining up neatly with our 30- and 31-day months. It happens roughly once every two and a half years, which is exactly where the phrase "once in a blue moon" comes from. Many practitioners treat a blue moon as a bonus working — a good night for something you've been saving, or for a first attempt at something you've never tried.
How to actually use this
You don't need to memorize all twelve. The simplest way to use this list is to check which moon you're currently under on the Moon Phases page and let that month's traditional focus loosely inform what you set an intention around that full moon — same underlying idea as the phase-based guidance in Why the Moon Phases Matter to Practice, just with a second, monthly layer of texture on top of it.
- Farmers’ Almanac, “Full Moon Names” (farmersalmanac.com) — on the Algonquian, colonial, and almanac origins of the traditional monthly moon names and how they vary by source
- Denise Zimmermann and Katherine A. Gleason, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft, 3rd ed., revised with Miria Liguana (Alpha Books, 2006) — a widely-used beginner practice guide; source for the seasonal-moon correspondence tradition this page draws its associations from
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