A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
cobweb morning
A cobweb morning is one of those still, damp autumn mornings when dew condenses on spider silk and every web in a field becomes visible at once. Sheet webs that were invisible the day before turn up in the hundreds across grass and hedges. It happens when a clear cold night drops the ground below the dew point with no wind to disturb the silk.
Etymology
The old English word for a spider was attercop, which meant poison-head, and cop on its own also meant spider. A cobweb is a cop-web, a spider’s web, with the older word for the animal surviving in nothing but this compound. Attercop lasted in dialect and got a second life when Tolkien had Bilbo shout it at the spiders of Mirkwood. The modern word spider is unrelated and comes from spinning.
Notes
Most of what shows up on a cobweb morning is the sheet web of money spiders, which are tiny and enormously numerous. Young ones of many species disperse by ballooning, letting out a line of silk until the air lifts them, and a warm autumn day after a cobweb morning can carry thousands of them over a field at once.