Attercop is an Old English word to mean a spider, or an ill-mannered, peevish person, from attor (poison) and cop (the head). (Cop, or coppa, was also used by itself to mean a spider, so cobweb should really be spelled copweb.) The name was given to spiders in the belief that they were all poisonous to humans. By the sixteenth century it had begun to be applied to a cross-grained, ill-natured, figuratively venomous person. Norwegian for "spider" is edderkopp.