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n. 1. Any of numerous arachnids of the order Araneae, having a body divided into a cephalothorax and an abdomen, eight legs, two chelicerae that bear venom glands, and two or more spinnerets that produce the silk used to make nests, cocoons, or webs for trapping insects. 2. One that resembles a spider, as in appearance, character, or movement. 3. A program that automatically retrieves webpages and follows the links on them to retrieve more webpages. Spiders are used by search engines to retrieve publicly accessible webpages for indexing, and they can also be used to check for links to webpages that no longer exist. Also called crawler, search bot. 5. A trivet. [Middle English spither, from Old English spīthra; see (s)pen- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] |
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