In the 5th century, people followed moon cycles to keep time as there were no calendars.
During those days, it was a European custom for the newly-wed to drink mead during their first moon of marriage.
Mead is a honey-based alcoholic drink believed to have aphrodisiac properties.
Honey-based sweetness on the full moon was the likely source of the Old English phrase Hony Moone from which the modern-day word honeymoon comes.
Hony Moone was first used in writing in the 1540s in a negative context.
Hony was used to refer to a period of tenderness and sweet pleasure that the newly-wed couple feels.
Moone was used to indicate how the love between the couple wanes like the changing moon, which soon begins to wane.
By the end of the 1500s, the word saw use in the political context as well.
E.g., “the brief honeymoon of the new king and his parliament.”
Honeymoon’s association with after-marriage vacation is attributed to the German author Johann Karl August Musäus.
He wrote the following sentence in his story collection (which was later translated to English) in the 1780s:
“The new-married couple spent their honeymoon in Augspurg, in mutual happiness and innocent enjoyments, like the first human pair in the garden of Eden.”
And the word was used in this context, again in 1804 in an English story collection by Maria Edgeworth.
From then on, the word’s usage to mean “a vacation taken by a newly married couple” caught on.
