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What is "cobweb"

Crossword clues for cobweb

cobweb
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
cobweb
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ VERB
blow
▪ It will blow the cobwebs away.
▪ It blew all the cobwebs away.
▪ Talk about blowing the cobwebs away!
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But there was no dust, no dirt, no cobwebs.
▪ He put his hand up to his face, as if to clear the cobwebs from his thoughts, then shrugged.
▪ He swept her resistance aside as if it were a cobweb.
▪ Her wispy gray hair was loose, hanging down her back like cobwebs, and her hands were folded in her lap.
▪ I know that I am not meant to vac up the spiders, just their cobwebs.
▪ Peering through the cobwebs at the stable clock, Umberto realized he should have been up an hour ago.
▪ There are enough teachers who sleepwalk through their profession, mindsets clogged with cobwebs.
▪ This means, in the two preview episodes, brushing away canons of ethics like cobwebs.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
cobweb

Spider web \Spi"der web"\, or Spider's web \Spi"der's web"\ . (Zo["o]l.) The silken web which is formed by most kinds of spiders, particularly the web spun to entrap their prey; -- also called cobweb. See Geometric spider, Triangle spider, under Geometric, and Triangle.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
cobweb

early 14c., coppewebbe; the first element is Old English -coppe, in atorcoppe "spider," literally "poison-head" (see attercop). Spelling with -b- is from 16c., perhaps from cob. Cob as a stand-alone for "a spider" was an old word nearly dead even in dialects when J.R.R. Tolkien used it in "The Hobbit" (1937).

Wiktionary
cobweb

n. 1 A spiderweb, or the remains of one, especially an asymmetrical one that is woven with an irregular pattern of threads. 2 One of its filaments; gossamer 3 (context figurative English) Something thin and unsubstantial, or flimsy and worthless; rubbish. 4 An intricate plot to catch the unwary 5 (context internet rare slang English) A web page that either has not been updated for a long time, or that is rarely visited 6 The European spotted flycatcher, (taxlink Muscicapa striata species noshow=1).

Related phrases:
WordNet
cobweb

  1. n. filaments from a cobweb [syn: gossamer]

  2. a dense elaborate spider web that is more efficient than the orb web

Wikipedia
Cobweb (disambiguation)

A cobweb is a spider web.

Cobweb may also refer to:

Cobweb (comics)

The Cobweb is a comic book heroine co-created by famed writer Alan Moore and veteran underground artist Melinda Gebbie. Cobweb's only apparent powers were allure and the ability to make an entrance. The Cobweb first appeared in the premier issue of Tomorrow Stories, an anthology title in the America's Best Comics line.

Cobweb (clustering)

COBWEB is an incremental system for hierarchical conceptual clustering. COBWEB was invented by Professor Douglas H. Fisher, currently at Vanderbilt University.

COBWEB incrementally organizes observations into a classification tree. Each node in a classification tree represents a class (concept) and is labeled by a probabilistic concept that summarizes the attribute-value distributions of objects classified under the node. This classification tree can be used to predict missing attributes or the class of a new object.

There are four basic operations COBWEB employs in building the classification tree. Which operation is selected depends on the category utility of the classification achieved by applying it. The operations are:

  • Merging Two Nodes
    Merging two nodes means replacing them by a node whose children is the union of the original nodes' sets of children and which summarizes the attribute-value distributions of all objects classified under them.
  • Splitting a node
    A node is split by replacing it with its children.
  • Inserting a new node
    A node is created corresponding to the object being inserted into the tree.
  • Passing an object down the hierarchy
    Effectively calling the COBWEB algorithm on the object and the subtree rooted in the node.
Cobweb (horse)

Cobweb (1821–1848) was an undefeated British Thoroughbred racehorse and who won two British Classic Races as a three-year-old and went on to become a highly successful broodmare. Cobweb's racing career consisted of three competitive races in the early part of 1824. After winning on her debut she claimed a second prize when her opponents were withdrawn by their owners. She then won the 1000 Guineas at Newmarket Racecourse and the Oaks Stakes at Epsom Downs Racecourse before being retired to stud.

Cobweb produced three classic winners, including the Epsom Derby winner Bay Middleton, and several other successful racehorses. Through her daughter Clementina she is the direct female ancestor of many champions of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Usage examples of "cobweb".

They left the dark upper corners of the human quarters where, mourning the loss of Billy Anker and his girl, they had clung in loose temporary skeins like cobwebs in the folds of an old curtain.

How this simple axiom sweeps away, for instance, the cobweb speculations as to whether voting is a natural right, or a privilege delegated by society!

One day we took food with us and ventured further into the cobwebbed rooms and corridors than we had ever been before.

In a matter of a few calm breaths Elminster was inside the dark chamber, with the door shut and spell-sealed behind him, and a radiance of his own making awakening everywhere along the low, cobwebbed ceiling.

The dew-grey cobwebs enwrapped the flowers of their hearts--yet every prisoned flower could be seen.

Rod shook his head as if to get away from the cobwebs of an irrecoverable tragedy.

There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches readied up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and street lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.

The things were full of cobwebs and dead insects and rat turds, poorly lit by the occasional inward-looking peephole or narrow slits or oillets in the exterior masonry.

Mack continued, pretending to sort through the cobwebs of his mind for the correct point of departure, not only fully aware of exactly where he had left off but of the precise order and nuance of each word he was about to utter - written, rewritten, rehearsed, and performed for hours on end each night for the past month before the cracked mirror in his cheap roach-ridden flat on West 103rd Street.

Through the wide windows opposite the foot of his iron-framed bed shone a broad rectangle of chalky arc light from the yard below, making eerie runic shadows of the bare ceiling beams with their trailing curtains of cobweb.

Moswell and Swithe had both eaten with Cobweb and myself in the dining room, though my father had not been there.

Cobweb never left his side, and Moswell and Swithe did not come to sit with us in the evening again for quite some time.

Cobweb stood staring into the ice, Swithe some distance away, arms folded.

I bullied Swithe and Cobweb to take me into Galhea with them and occasionally they would relent and we would go into the town, perhaps to eat at the best inn, where they treated us like royalty, or to walk in the market where traders would respectfully entreat us to inspect their wares.

Varrish Cobweb, the Kakkahaar viper Ulaume and, of course, Pellaz, Tigron of the Gelaming.