Definition
The word "Moonie" is derived from the name of Sun Myung Moon, the founder and leader of the Unification Church. The 2002 edition of The World Book Dictionary does not note a negative connotation, defining it simply as: "a follower of Sun Myung Moon"; nor does the 1999 edition of the Webster's II New College Dictionary, which defines it as "a member of the Unification Church established and headed by Sun Myung Moon." The 2009 Random House Dictionary states the word is offensive, and the 2009 Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines it as derogatory in nature. The Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Japan describes it as a colloquial term to refer to a member of the Unification Church.
The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2005), The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2007), and The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English (2008) give a secondary meaning as "any blind, unthinking, unquestioning follower of a philosophy."
The word "Moonie" is also a family name in the United Kingdom. The town of Moonie, Queensland in Australia was founded in 1840. In more recent times it has also been used to refer to fans of the anime character Sailor Moon. See also: Moonie (disambiguation).
Read more about this topic: Moonie (nickname)
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“... we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.”
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)