1. Predatory arachnid with eight legs, two poison fangs, two feelers, and usually two silk-spinning organs at the back end of the body; they spin silk to make cocoons for eggs or traps for prey
   "The orb-weaver spider's intricate web glistened with dew in the morning light"
    
2. A computer program that prowls the internet looking for publicly accessible resources that can be added to a database; the database can then be searched with a search engine
   "The web spider indexed millions of web pages for the search engine";
   - crawler, web crawler
    
3. [US] A skillet made of cast iron
   "He cooked cornbread in a well-seasoned spider"

1. (computing) automatically follow links on the internet in order to gather information from many linked pages
   "my home page is regularly spidered by search engines"

Derived forms: spidering, spiders, spidered

Type of: arachnid, arachnoid, computer program, computer programme [Brit], frying pan, frypan [N. Amer], program, programme [Brit, Cdn], skillet [N. Amer]

Part of: Araneae, Araneida, order Araneae, order Araneida

Encyclopedia: Spider, KY