ἀράχν-η

ἀράχνη (arachne, "ah-RAHKH-nay") is the Greek word for spider — and for the web the spider makes, the two senses braided together in the record. The corpus keeps it small and scattered: 10 occurrences across 7 works. It clusters most in the Septuagint's poetry of affliction — Job (2), Psalmi, the Psalms (2), Isaias, the book of Isaiah (1) — while tragedy carries it twice in Aeschylus's Agamemnon (2). Beyond these it appears singly: in Hesiod's Works and Days (1), in Epictetus's Discourses (1), and in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (1). Of the cited authors Hesiod is the oldest, so the word's earliest surface here is not the tragic one but the didactic — ἀράχνης in the Works and Days.

The lexica agree on the plain sense and split only on grammatical gender and which form means which. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) files ἀράχνη as feminine and separates the meanings: first the creature, citing ἀράχνης ἐν ὑφάσματι, "in the spider's weaving," at Agamemnon 1492, then, as a second sense, "spider's web." Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it "spider's web, spider" and marks variants — masculine ἀράχνης for the animal, and ἄραχνος found in Aeschylus — plus the derivative ἀράχνιον, "little spider's web." Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) and Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) record the same doubling.

No etymology pointer is matched in the record — the honest gap. Frisk's own entry ventures a derivation from *arak-sn-, with a Latin counterpart in arāneus, "spider," and arānea, "spider's web," but he hedges it ("wie wahrscheinlich," as is probable), and it is his lexicon's suggestion, not a listed pointer.

When a single word holds both the spinner and the thing spun, which one does it truly name?