Cobwebs and spider webs

by James K. Sayre

Recently I was mulling over the term, cobweb, and wondering where it came from and what exactly it meant. So I checked my reliable old Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, copyright 1936, and it said that cobweb came from the Middle English cobbe, spider + web. So basically, cobwebs and spider webs are the same thing.

In modern American usage, however, cobweb usually refers to dusty old spider webs found inside of older houses, supposedly spooky or haunted. In my old house, which is definitely not haunted, the cobwebs get more and more tangled together and eventually crash to the floor, when their collective weight over comes their strength. Basic physics.

The late summer and early autumn webs of the orb-weaver garden spiders are a sight to behold. They are engineering marvels, contructed with strong, yet very light weight strands of spider silk, which are long chains of various proteins. Imagine climbing up a hundred-foot-high tree and then tossing a silken rope to another fifty-foot-high tree, some twenty feet away and then rapelling down the rope and creating a web. Orb-weaver spiders do this (on their own reduced scale) without much hesitation, presumably... Mother Nature provides endless small wonders for us to observe, if we only take a little time to do so...

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Web page last updated on3 October 2007.