Word.ws English Dictionary

crab spider

crab spider noun: any spider of the family Thomisidae of spiders that hunt in flowers.

crab spider: any spider of the family Thomisidae of spiders that hunt in flowers
Image: Olaf Leillinger, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

crab spider (plural crab spiders)

  1. Any spider of the family Thomisidae of spiders that hunt in flowers.
    • In temperate regions, these comprise predominantly the adults of smaller money spiders (Linyphiidae) or the juveniles of larger wolf— and crabspiders (Lycosidae, Thomisidae).2012, Jean Clobert, Michel Baguette, Tim G. Benton, Dispersal Ecology and Evolution

Forms of crab spider

pluralcrab spiders
alternative formcrabspider

Origin of crab spider

crab + spider. From being a spider have a resemblance to crabs.

Questions about crab spider

What does crab spider mean?
Crab spider means any spider of the family Thomisidae of spiders that hunt in flowers.
What part of speech is crab spider?
Crab spider is a noun.
What is the plural of crab spider?
The plural of crab spider is crab spiders.

Words near crab spider in the dictionary

  1. crab puff
  2. crab puffs
  3. crab rangoon
  4. crab rangoons
  5. crab soccer
  6. crab spider
  7. crab spiders
  8. crab stick
  9. crab sticks
  10. crab tree
  11. crab trees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crab spider (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “crab spider.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crab_spider. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.