gossamer – English noun declension

English noun forms of gossamer

Noun: gossamer
Singulargossamer
Pluralgossamers

Sample Sentences

  • A lover may bestride the gossamer / That idles in the wanton summer air, / And yet not fall; so light is vanity. [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]:]
  • The filmy Gossamer now flitts no more, [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:]
  • 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. [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:]
  • The dew and gossamer had dried early from the grass [1972, Richard Adams, chapter 26, in Watership Down, Penguin, published 1974, part 2, page 233:]
  • Madame wiped the picture with her gossamer handkerchief and impulsively pressed a tender kiss upon the painted canvas. [1894, Kate Chopin, “A Lady of Bayou St. John”, in Bayou Folk, Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin, page 306:]
  • She takes a large, gossamer scarf from the trunk and drapes it about her shoulders. [1947, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, New York, N.Y.: Signet, Scene 5, p. 84:]
  • a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes [2013, Rachel Kushner, chapter 14, in The Flamethrowers, New York: Scribner, page 231:]

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. See: Middle English Nouns 'gossomer'.

Verbs referencing "gossamer"

German Nouns Altweibersommer.