gossamer

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)A fine film made up of cobwebs, seen floating in the air or caught on bushes, etc.

   “A lover may bestride the gossamer / That idles in the wanton summer air, / And yet not fall; so light is vanity.”

   “The filmy Gossamer now flitts no more,”

   “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.”

   “The dew and gossamer had dried early from the grass”

2. (countable, uncountable)A soft, sheer fabric.

   “Madame wiped the picture with her gossamer handkerchief and impulsively pressed a tender kiss upon the painted canvas.”

   “She takes a large, gossamer scarf from the trunk and drapes it about her shoulders.”

   “a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes”

3. (countable, figuratively, uncountable)Anything delicate, light and flimsy.

adj

1. Tenuous, light, filmy or delicate.

   “There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”

   “The heaven was spangled with tremulous stars, and at the horizon the clouds hung down in gossamer folds—God's robe trailing in the sea!”

   “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.”

   “His two previous novels, though much celebrated, I found too ethereal, the style as gossamer and sticky as cotton candy.”

   “A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.”