Group of spiders gathered around a dead fly at a web design meeting, illustrating “A Murder of Spiders.”
by
Group of spiders gathered around a dead fly at a web design meeting, illustrating "A Murder of Spiders."
A group of spiders is rarely called a murder, most likely a playful echo of “a murder of crows.”

What Does “A Murder of Spiders” Mean?

“Murder” is famously the collective noun for crows, and its occasional, informal application to spiders is best understood as playful borrowing rather than an established, traditional term. Spiders are overwhelmingly solitary predators, and there’s no historical hunting or naturalist tradition behind “murder of spiders” the way there is behind older, catalogued terms like “clutter” or “cluster of spiders.”

The appeal is fairly obvious, though: spiders are predators, “murder” already carries a dark, dramatic ring from its crow association, and the pairing has the same kind of morbid charm that makes “a murder of crows” so memorable in the first place. If you do encounter a genuine group of spiders, it’s far more likely to be spiderlings freshly hatched from an egg sac, or, in the case of a handful of truly social species, a colony working shared webbing, than anything resembling an organized “murder.”

Example: “The horror movie poster joked about a murder of spiders lurking in the basement, though real spiders would rather avoid each other entirely.”

Related: Collective Nouns for Arachnids · What Is a Group of Spiders Called?

Leave a Comment