''gossamer'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

↩ 🔳 🔳 🔳

---

Primary

⁀➴

''gossamer'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260213210016-00-⌔

gossamer - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

gossamer (countable and uncountable, plural gossamers)

🖼️ ➺

• A fine film made up of cobwebs, seen floating in the air or caught on bushes, etc.
  • ✤ A lover may bestride the gossamer/That idles in the wanton summer air,/And yet not fall; so light is vanity.¹
  • ✤ The filmy Gossamer now flitts no more,²
  • ✤ 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.³
  • ✤ The dew and gossamer had dried early from the grass⁴
• A soft, sheer fabric.
  • ✤ Madame wiped the picture with her gossamer handkerchief and impulsively pressed a tender kiss upon the painted canvas.⁵
  • ✤ She takes a large, gossamer scarf from the trunk and drapes it about her shoulders.⁶
  • ✤ a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes⁷
• (figurative) Anything delicate, light and flimsy.

Adjective

gossamer (comparative more gossamer, superlative most gossamer)

• Tenuous, light, filmy or delicate.
  • ✤ There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.⁸
  • ✤ The heaven was spangled with tremulous stars, and at the horizon the clouds hung down in gossamer folds—God’s robe trailing in the sea!⁹
  • ✤ He walked. To the corner of Hamilton Place and Picadilly, and there stayed for a while, for it is a romantic station by night. The vague and careless rain looked like threads of gossamer silver passing across the light of the arc-lamps.¹⁰
  • ✤ His two previous novels, though much celebrated, I found too ethereal, the style as gossamer and sticky as cotton candy.¹¹
  • ✤ A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.¹²

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”)¹³ and to have initially referred to a period of warm weather in late autumn when geese were eaten^14151617 — compare Middle Scots goesomer, goe-summer (“summery weather in late autumn; St Martin’s summer”)¹³ and dialectal English go-harvest,¹⁸ both later connected in folk-etymology to go¹⁷¹⁹²⁰ — and to have been transferred to cobwebs because they were frequent then or because they were likened to goose- down.^14151716 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”.²¹ Weekley notes that both the webs and the weather have fantastical names in most European languages:²² compare German Altweibersommer (“Indian summer; cobwebs, gossamer”, literally “old wives’ summer”) and other terms listed there.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈɡɒ.sə.mə/
• (General American) IPA: /ˈɡɑ.sə.mɚ/
• Audio (Australian): 🔊

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene vi]: ↩

2. 1697, Virgil, “The First Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, line 453: ↩

3. 1886 May 1 – July 31, Robert Louis Stevenson, chapter 22, in Kidnapped, being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: […], London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 1886, →OCLC, page 222: ↩

4. 1972, Richard Adams, chapter 26, in Watership Down, Penguin, published 1974, part 2, page 233: ↩

5. 1894, Kate Chopin, “A Lady of Bayou St. John”, in Bayou Folk ‎${}^{[1]}$, Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin, page 306: ↩

6. 1947, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire ‎${}^{[2]}$, New York, N.Y.: Signet, Scene 5, p. 84: ↩

7. 2013, Rachel Kushner, chapter 14, in The Flamethrowers, New York: Scribner, page 231: ↩

8. 1845, Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”, in Tales ‎${}^{[3]}$, New York: Wiley and Putnam, page 37: ↩

9. 1857, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Daisy’s Necklace: And What Came of It: ↩

10. 1922, Michael Arlen, “Ep./1/2”, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days: ↩

11. 1982 December 4, Mitzel, “A Sissy’s Revenge”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 20, page 9: ↩

12. 1997, Arundhati Roy, chapter 2, in The God of Small Things ‎${}^{[4]}$, New York: Random House, page 83: ↩

13. “gọ̄s-sŏmer, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007. ↩ ↩²

14. “gossamer”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present. ↩ ↩²

15. “gossamer”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present. ↩ ↩²

16. “gossamer”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩ ↩²

17. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “gossamer”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩ ↩² ↩³

18. Joseph Wright, editor (1900), “GO-HARVEST”, in The English Dialect Dictionary: […], volume II (D–G), London: Henry Frowde, […], publisher to the English Dialect Society, […]; New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, →OCLC. ↩

19. “goesomer, n.”, in The Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004–present, →OCLC: “https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/goesomer” ↩

20. Joseph Wright, editor (1900), “GO-SUMMER”, in The English Dialect Dictionary: […], volume II (D–G), London: Henry Frowde, […], publisher to the English Dialect Society, […]; New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, →OCLC. ↩

21. Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (2013 edition), page 246 ↩

22. Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1967), volume 1, page 653 ↩

Link to original

Secondary

• • •

---