English Dictionary

COBWEB

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does cobweb mean? 

COBWEB (noun)
  The noun COBWEB has 3 senses:

1. a fabric so delicate and transparent as to resemble a web of a spiderplay

2. filaments from a web that was spun by a spiderplay

3. a dense elaborate spider web that is more efficient than the orb webplay

  Familiarity information: COBWEB used as a noun is uncommon.


 Dictionary entry details 


COBWEB (noun)


Sense 1

Meaning:

A fabric so delicate and transparent as to resemble a web of a spider

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Hypernyms ("cobweb" is a kind of...):

cloth; fabric; material; textile (artifact made by weaving or felting or knitting or crocheting natural or synthetic fibers)

Derivation:

cobwebby (so thin as to transmit light)


Sense 2

Meaning:

Filaments from a web that was spun by a spider

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

cobweb; gossamer

Hypernyms ("cobweb" is a kind of...):

fibril; filament; strand (a very slender natural or synthetic fiber)


Sense 3

Meaning:

A dense elaborate spider web that is more efficient than the orb web

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Hypernyms ("cobweb" is a kind of...):

spider's web; spider web (a web spun by spiders to trap insect prey)


 Context examples 


To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

She was brown with the dust and draped with the cobwebs which had come from the walls of her hiding-place.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I went into another room, where the walls and ceiling were all hung round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

The bees actually moved wood chips to access his mushroom’s mycelium, the branching fibers of fungus that look like cobwebs.

(Mushroom Extract Could Help Save Bees from Virus, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

One fist unclosed, and the open palm swept across his eyes as though brushing away cobwebs.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Hearts confined by cobwebs would burst at last, and then Love was avenged.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll’s predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes, he answered; and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

His hand was sweeping nervously across his face, as though he were brushing away cobwebs.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood for disadvantageous.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)



 Learn English with... Proverbs 
"If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it probably needed fixing anyway." (English proverb)

"Do not wait for good things to search for you, you search for them." (Albanian proverb)

"The sun won't stay behind the cloud." (Armenian proverb)

"With friends like these, who needs enemies?" (Croatian proverb)



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