gibbous

adj

Etymology: From Middle English gibbous, from Latin gibbus (“humped, hunched”), probably cognate with cubō (“bend oneself, lie down”), Italian gobba (“humpback”), Ancient Greek κῡφός (kūphós, “humpback, bent”), κύβος (kúbos, “cube, vertebra”), Spanish giboso (“humped”). Also ultimately compare dialectal Norwegian keiv (“slanted, wrong”), German schief (“crooked, slanting”) and Dutch scheef (“crooked, slanting”).

1. Curved or bulged outward.

   “In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]”

2. Having more than half (but not the whole) of its disc illuminated.

   “The moving moon, full, gibbous, or crescent-shaped, shone at last for the navigators of the eighteenth century like a luminous hand on the clock of heaven.”

   “On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a photograph of a gibbous Earth at a distance of eighteen thousand miles from its surface.”

3. Humpbacked.

   “A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back;”