Today's Broadcast

Topic: Cobwebs & spider webs

A correspondent observed that cobwebs can easily be discerned from spider webs and asked what, if anything, links the two terms.

Arachnophobes, close your eyes while we spin out the tale: both cobwebs and spider webs have the spider in common. The word spider has kin in the Old English verb meaning "to spin"; but what about the spider web?

Spider web names the silk web constructed by a spider especially to entrap prey; the web is composed of a viscid fluid secreted by glands in the abdomen and discharged through minute glands in the spinnerets. The web hardens on exposure to air and tends to have a form consistent within a genus or family.

Although the term cobweb can indeed be used for "the network spread out by a spider to catch its prey," that word is also used both for a single thread spun by a spider and for tangles of such thread with dirt and dust that have accumulated and adhered. The cob in cobweb comes from coppe, the Middle English word for "spider." That coppe has an Old English ancestor ator-coppe which meant roughly "poison-spider" or "venom-spider."

We can thank the Scottish for the only other coppe-born word still in the lexicon. Ettercap—from the Old English poison-spider—is used in Scottish English for both a "spider" and "an ill-tempered or spiteful person."

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.