gossamer
/ˈɡɑ.sə.mɚ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 2.44 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "A lover may bestride the gossamer / That idles in the wanton summer air, / And yet not fall; so light is vanity."
- "The filmy Gossamer now flitts no more,"
- "I had been dead-heavy before, and now I felt a kind of dreadful lightness, which would not suffer me to walk. I drifted like a gossamer; the ground seemed to me a cloud, the hills a feather-weight, the air to have a current, like a running burn, which carried me to and fro."
- "The dew and gossamer had dried early from the grass"
- "Madame wiped the picture with her gossamer handkerchief and impulsively pressed a tender kiss upon the painted canvas."
- "She takes a large, gossamer scarf from the trunk and drapes it about her shoulders."
Etymology
From Middle English gossomer, gosesomer, gossummer (attested since around 1300, and only in reference to webs or other light things), usually thought to derive from gos (“goose”) + somer (“summer”) and to have initially referred to a period of warm weather in late autumn when geese were eaten — compare Middle Scots goesomer, goe-summer (“summery weather in late autumn; St Martin's summer”) and dialectal English go-harvest, both later connected in folk-etymology to go — and to have been transferred to cobwebs because they were frequent then or because they were likened to goose-down. Skeat says that in Craven the webs were called summer-goose, and compares Scots and dialectal English use of summer-colt in reference to "exhalations seen rising from the ground in hot weather". Weekley notes that both the webs and the weather have fantastical names in most European languages: compare German Altweibersommer (“Indian summer; cobwebs, gossamer”, literally “old wives' summer”) and other terms listed there.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: gossomer
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈɡɑ.sə.mɚ/
- British English: /ˈɡɒ.sə.mə/