Gossamer is fine floating spider silk, or anything as delicate. Gossamer threads, gossamer wings, as light as gossamer.
The real thing is what young spiders spin to ride the wind, and on still autumn mornings whole fields can be covered in it. As a modifier it means impossibly fine and light. Note the likely origin: goose summer, an old name for late autumn when geese were eaten and the webs appear.
1noungossamerFine floating spider silk.
“In the early morning, gossamer glittered with dew across the whole field.”
2adjectiveextremelyExtremely fine and delicate.
“The bride wore a gossamer veil that floated in the breeze.”
gossamer is a fine web.
Middle English gossomer is probably goose plus summer, from an old name for late autumn when the webs are seen and geese were eaten.
Middle English
gossomer
English, today
gossamer
Built from
From Middle English gossomer, gosesomer, gossummer (attested since around 1300, and only in reference to webs or other light things), usually thought to derive from gos (“goose”) + somer (“summer”) and to have initially referred to a period of warm weather in late autumn when geese were eaten — compare Middle Scots goesomer (“summery weather in late autumn; St Martin's summer”) and dialectal go-harvest, both later connected in folk-etymology to go — and to have been transferred to cobwebs because they were frequent then or because they were likened to goose-down. Skeat says that in Craven the webs were called summer-goose, and compares Scots and dialectal English use of summer-colt in reference to "exhalations seen rising from the ground in hot weather". Weekley notes that both the webs and the weather have fantastical names in most European languages: compare German Altweibersommer (“Indian summer; cobwebs, gossamer”) literally “old wives' summer” and other terms listed there.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire