Definition of "gossamer"
gossamer
noun
countable and uncountable, plural gossamers
A fine film or strand as of cobwebs, floating in the air or caught on bushes, etc.
Quotations
A lover may bestride the gossamerThat 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, [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, page 222
Quotations
adjective
comparative more gossamer, superlative most gossamer
Tenuous, light, filmy or delicate.
Quotations
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