spidered

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of spider.

   Overnight, the crawler spidered thousands of pages across the entire domain.

   The frozen glass had spidered into a web of fine cracks.

   Note

   Most of the verb's senses are intransitive, so this form usually follows have rather than turning passive: cracks have spidered across the glass, a climber spidered up the wall. The computing sense is the exception, since a crawler spiders a site and its pages get spidered. Do not confuse it with the cobwebbed adjective, which describes a place full of spiders, not something that moved or spread.

2. 2
   adjective

   Infested with spiders, or covered over with the cobwebs they leave behind.

   She swept out the spidered shed before storing the garden tools for winter.

   The abandoned chapel was dim and spidered, its corners draped in gray strands.

   Similarcobwebbed, cobwebby

   Note

   A gradable adjective: one shed can be more spidered than the next, and an abandoned chapel the most spidered of all. It also stretches past the literal. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) describes a conference table shiny with "the spidered light of an Arizona noon," light broken fine and threaded like a web. It shares its spelling with the past form of the verb.

Showing meanings only. Show all 2