Weaver

How to spell weaver

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce weaver

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weaver mean?

1. nounA person who makes cloth or other fabric by interlacing threads, often on a loom.
2. nounA small African or Asian bird known for building intricately woven nests.

Weaver in a sentence

• The weaver set up the loom before threading the warp.

• The weaver knotted blades of grass into a hanging nest near the river.

• Each weaver in the cooperative produced a distinctive pattern of wool.

• A bright yellow weaver flitted between the reeds at the water's edge.

Where does weaver come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English verb wefan, meaning 'to interlace threads into cloth', a craft so ancient that the verb belongs to the common Germanic stock; related forms appear in Old Norse vefa and Old High German weban. Adding the agent suffix -er produced a noun for the person who does the weaving, paralleling the way 'baker' grew from 'bake' and 'singer' from 'sing'. The same root quietly survives in the noun 'web', which originally meant a woven fabric long before it described a spider's snare or the internet. The spelling keeps the 'ea' digraph for the long 'ee' sound, the trap that catches writers who expect 'weever' or 'weiver'. By extension, certain birds that build elaborately interlaced nests were named weavers, carrying the textile metaphor into natural history.

How the word is built

• weave (from Old English wefan: to interlace threads)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)