spider lightning
spider lightning noun: very long flashes of lightning (tens or sometimes hundreds of kilometers long) that travel horizontally across the sky, tapping extensive pools of electrical charge in the clouds, particular once a CG (cloud-to-ground) channel is established.
Noun
spider lightning (uncountable)
- Very long flashes of lightning (tens or sometimes hundreds of kilometers long) that travel horizontally across the sky, tapping extensive pools of electrical charge in the clouds, particular once a CG (cloud-to-ground) channel is established.
- One evening while working, Michael Peterson found himself staring at an enormous spider. But Peterson, a remote sensing scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wasn’t looking at a critter of the eight-legged variety. Instead the form crawling across his screen was a monstrous flash of...2019 August 22, Maya Wei-Haas, “Record-breaking lightning as long as Kansas spotted”, in National Geographic
Questions about spider lightning
- What does spider lightning mean?
- Spider lightning means very long flashes of lightning (tens or sometimes hundreds of kilometers long) that travel horizontally across the sky, tapping extensive pools of electrical charge in the clouds, particular once a CG (cloud-to-ground) channel is established.
- What part of speech is spider lightning?
- Spider lightning is a noun.
Words near spider lightning in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: spider lightning (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.
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