cobweb [ME] An old word for a spider was a coppe or cop. This was a shortened form of the Old English attercop, for spider and literally meaning ‘poison head’, which turns up in a song sung by Bilbo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). A spider’s web came to be called a coppeweb or copweb, and this was later modified to cobweb.