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weaver

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈwiː.və(ɹ)//
  • United States//ˈwi.vɚ//

A person who weaves; especially, one who weaves cloth for a living.

noun

  1. 1

    A person who weaves; especially, one who weaves cloth for a living.

    The Silks, varniſh'd Works, Ink, Paper, and in general every thing that comes, both from Nan-king and the other Cities of the Province, which carry on an aſtoniſhing Trade, is much more eſteem'd and dear, than what is brought from other Provinces. In the City Shang-hay only, and the Villages belonging to it, they reckon above 200,000 Weavers of Callico.

  2. 2

    A horizontal strand of material used in basket weaving.

    To add a new weaver, simply soak a new one, slide one end under a rib (over the old weaver) and continue weaving with both of them until the old one runs out. […] If your weaver has dried, rewet it and weave several rows as in Diagram 26.

  3. 3

    A weaverbird.

  4. 4

    An aquatic beetle of the genus Gyrinus.

  5. 5

    Any of certain spider species, such as the sheet weaver or the funnel weaver, so named because they spin interesting and characteristic webs.

  6. 6

    Any of certain fish of the family Pinguipedidae.

Etymology

From Middle English wevere, wever, from Old English *wefere, *wifre, *wæfre (“weaver”, in compounds), from Proto-West Germanic *webārī. By surface analysis, weave + -er. Compare Saterland Frisian Weeuwer (“weaver”), Dutch wever (“weaver”), German Low German Wever (“weaver”), German Weber (“weaver”), Swedish vävare (“weaver”), Icelandic vefari (“weaver”).

Forms

plural
weavers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).