spideret

plural spiderets

1. rareA baby spider.

   What shrieks and groans of widow spideresses and orphaned spiderets must haunt his guilty slumbers!

   1830 September 11, Horace Guilford, “The King of the Spiders”, in The Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment, volume VI, number XII, London: […] Shackell and Carfrae, […] Joseph Shackell […], published 1831, page 187, column 1

   3 more examples

   See! what a busy region we disturb when we lift this stone! Half-a-dozen scarlet-bodied spiderets, “soldiers,” scampering away in most unmilitary haste to hide under crumbs of brown earth; here a grey-brownish slug, there a jet black one, larger and fatter, put out first one and then another tentacle, resenting the intrusion on their slumber, while you wonder how such big, soft animals can lie, to say nothing of sleeping, under a mass of stone like this.

   1885, F. R. Coles, “[Communications.] I. A Leaflet from the Book of Nature.”, in The Transactions and Journal of Proceedings of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History & Antiquarian Society, sessions 1883-84, 1884-85, 1885-86, Dumfries: […] [T]he Courier and Herald Offices, published 1887, page 89

   Yesterday coming in from the garden Annie called my attention to a something in a cobweb that I had thought was a spider and had left undisturbed, but on looking at it through my glasses it seemed a cluster of tiny eggs, with one or two tiny spiderets in motion.

   1918 May 10, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922, volume II, London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, […], published 1926, page 354

   Mr. Merrywinkle, the spider, crawling through the corn, / Spotted Mistress June Bug on a summer morn / Oh, how he loved Ms. June Bug! […] And the couple settled, happily, within the spinach row, / To raise a thousand spiderets, each a handsome lad, / All proud as punch to call Mr. Merrywinkle, “Dad.”

   2011, Ken Layton, “Mr. Merrywinkle”, in Light Verse & Limericks, Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, →ISBN, page 20

   Synonyms: spiderlet, spiderling