web
Noun pluralwebs
Pluralwebs
- 1The World Wide Web, the collection of pages and other content that can be viewed online.
Most of the newspaper's archive can now be searched on the Web.
The Web has changed how students research their essays.
Note
The capital and the definite article mark it as a proper name, short for the World Wide Web: material is available on the Web, or found on the Web. Before another noun it works as a modifier, as in Web page, the name for the individual files into which the Web's content is divided.
- 2The silk structure a spider builds from threads produced by the spinnerets at the rear tip of its abdomen.
Morning frost outlined every web strung across the hedges.
The spider repairs its web each evening, eating the old silk as it goes.
Similarcobweb
Note
The spider's web is a woven thing by name as well as by look: the word comes through Old English webb from a root meaning 'weave', and many of its other meanings borrow that picture of crossing threads. When another kind of web could be meant, the compound spiderweb makes the spider explicit.
- 3Any interconnected set of people, places or things that, drawn as a diagram, would look like a spider's web.
Historians have tried to untangle the web of alliances that drew Europe into war.
Each new hire joins a web of relationships that no org chart fully captures.
Note
It usually takes of and the strands it is made of: a web of conjectures, a web of alliances, the web of life. Writers like to keep the weaving going, as Hawthorne does with forefathers who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose-color, and the word often suggests a tangle: Washington Irving speaks of extricating the truth from a web of conjectures.
- 4The fold of skin stretching between and joining the toes of certain birds and other animals, such as ducks and otters.
The web between a gull's toes spreads wide as it paddles.
Otters have webs between their toes that make them strong swimmers.
- 5
- 6A tall tale with more complexity than a myth or legend, usually spun or woven by the teller.
Around the campfire, the old guide spun a web so tangled that nobody could tell where the truth ended.
He can weave a web out of a trip to the grocery store, so take his stories with a grain of salt.
Similaryarn
Note
Like yarn, this web is a story named after thread, and the verbs keep up the picture: one spins or weaves a web just as one spins a yarn. It suggests a tale elaborate enough to tangle its listeners, entertaining to hear but unwise to lean on.
- 7
- 8A structure of crisscrossing strips or threads, whether built as a lattice or woven like cloth.
The weaver cut the finished web from the loom and folded it carefully.
The trellis formed a web of cedar laths along the garden wall.
Note
This is the sense closest to the weaver's craft, and in it a web can be a whole piece of cloth made on the loom: George Bancroft tells of colonists forbidden, on penalty of exile, to weave so much as a web or throw a shuttle. A lattice of thin wooden strips, such as a gazebo roof, takes the word by likeness.
- 9The webbing that fills the space between the thumb and forefinger of a baseball mitt.
The shortstop snagged the line drive in the web and flipped it to second.
The glove's leather web had stretched after years of use.
Note
Glove makers build the web in many patterns, and fielders choose by position. An open web, laced with gaps, lets a player see the ball through it; a closed web is solid, and pitchers often prefer one because it hides the grip before a pitch. Players say web and webbing interchangeably.
- 10To build a web, as a spider does, or to form into a web.
Tiny spiders had webbed between the porch railings overnight.
Frost began to web across the windowpane as the temperature dropped.
- 11To cover something with a web or a network.
Power lines web the sky above the old neighborhood.
By morning, frost had webbed the car's windows with fine white lines.
Similarcrisscross, lace
Note
The verb takes strands of any kind, and the construction to know is webbed with, which names them. In 1895 The Forum pictured the atmosphere being webbed with telegraph wires while continents were ribbed with railways. R. C. Stone, in The New England Farmer in 1853, shows the literal use: a new insect that makes itself a house by webbing the corner of a leaf.
- 12To fit or supply something with a web.
Craftsmen web the mitt by lacing rawhide between the thumb and forefinger.
The upholsterer webbed the frame with jute strips before adding the padding.
- 13A major radio or television broadcasting network.
The web hopes its new quiz show will win back the Tuesday night audience.
Sponsors lined up to buy time on all three webs that season.
Similarnetwork
Note
Show-business trade papers of the 1950s used it as brisk shorthand for the big networks: Billboard wrote of the major TV webs, NBC and CBS, and of ABC-TV, the web, reshaping its afternoon schedule. It now sounds dated and suits a period setting; elsewhere, network is the word.
- 14A band of webbing that controls how far the hood of a carriage extends.
The restorer replaced the frayed web that holds the carriage hood at the right angle.
With the web let out a notch, the hood rose higher over the passengers.
Note
It belongs to the vocabulary of the carriage trade and now sounds dated: a modern description of the same band would more likely call it a strap. Readers meet the word in this sense mainly in older writing about carriages and their fittings.
- 15A cataract in the eye.
A web had spread across the old sailor's left eye, leaving it pale and nearly blind.
The village healer claimed she could clear a web from the eye with herbs.
Note
Older medicine named this clouding of the eye with a pair of words, pin and web, or web and pin, and web alone could stand for the whole complaint. It is archaic now and met in older writing; in present-day use the word is cataract.
- 16To weave something, such as yarn into cloth.
Note
The verb keeps the weaving that the word's root names and that lies behind the spider's web: a statute of 1511–12 against deceitful cloth-making provides for woollen yarn to be webbed into cloth. Now obsolete, it has given way to weave itself.
- 17A unit of Rhenish glass made up of 60 bunches, used in the seventeenth century.
The merchant shipped three webs of Rhenish glass downriver that spring.
Each web was counted out by the bunch before the glass was loaded onto the barge.
Similarway
Note
The unit was a count, not a measure of size or weight: sixty bunches of Rhenish glass made one web, a quantity also called a way. It is obsolete, so a modern reader meets it only in writing about the glass trade of the seventeenth century.
- 18The row of barbs set along each side of a feather's shaft, whether stiff and joined by barbules, as in ordinary feathers, or soft and separate, as in down.
- 19The connecting part between the flanges of a structural member, which increases the effective lever arm and so the load the member can carry.
- 20The thinner upright section of a railroad rail, between the head at the top and the foot at the bottom.
- 21A continuous strip of material carried along by rollers while it is being processed.
- 22A long continuous sheet of paper fed from a roll into a printing press, rather than as separate sheets.
- 23A thin sheet, plate or strip of metal, such as lead.
- 24The thin metal blade of a saw.
- 25The thin metal blade of a sword.
- 26The bit of a key: the thin, flat metal part that works the lock.
- 27The thin, sharp cutting part of a plow's colter.
- 28One of the sections of a groin vault that lie between its ribs.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English web, webbe, from Old English webb, from Proto-Germanic *wabją, from Proto-Indo-European *webʰ- ("weave"). It is cognate with Scots wab, Dutch web, Danish væv, Icelandic vefur and Swedish väv ("web").