spiders

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of spider.

   Spiders spun fresh webs across the garden overnight.

   Several spiders scurried away when she lifted the flat stone.

   Note

   The plural is formed regularly with -s, and it carries every sense of spider, not only the eight-legged hunters of the order Araneae. Spiders can be programs that crawl the Web gathering information. In Australia and New Zealand they can be ice-cream floats made with soda or lemonade. In slang they can be spindly people, or men who persistently accost women in bars. Context, not form, tells you which spiders are meant.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of spider.

   The crawler spiders the entire site each night, indexing any new content.

   Whenever a fresh page appears, the bot spiders it within minutes.

   Note

   The verb form takes a singular subject: it spiders, the crawler spiders. With I, you, we and they, the bare spider is used. Its senses split by construction. Moving like a spider and spreading like a cobweb take no object, as in a crack spiders across the glass. The Web sense, borrowed from the noun for web-crawling programs, does take one: a bot spiders a site.

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