gossamer

plural gossamers

1. countableuncountableA fine film made up of cobwebs, seen floating in the air or caught on bushes, etc.

   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

   3 more examples

   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]

   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

2. countableuncountableA soft, sheer fabric.

   a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes

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

   2 more examples

   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

3. countablefigurativelyuncountableAnything delicate, light and flimsy.

comparative more gossamer · superlative most gossamer

1. Tenuous, light, filmy or delicate.

   A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.

   1997, Arundhati Roy, chapter 2, in The God of Small Things, New York: Random House, page 83

   4 more examples

   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.

   1845, Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”, in Tales, New York: Wiley and Putnam, page 37

   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!

   1857, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Daisy's Necklace: And What Came of It

   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.

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

   His two previous novels, though much celebrated, I found too ethereal, the style as gossamer and sticky as cotton candy.

   1982 December 4, Mitzel, “A Sissy's Revenge”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 20, page 9

   Synonyms: gossamery, gossamer-thin