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Araneae is the scientific name for Spiders.

There are tens of thousands of different kinds of spiders. Those that have been caught and classified have scientific names, but they frequently have common names if they regularly get noticed by people. There is no standard for these common names, so even within the same country the same species of spider could have more than one common name. In Canada, the same spider might have one common name in English and another common name in French.

In English we call the Salticidae "jumping spiders." But in Chinese they are called 蒼蠅虎 or just 蠅虎 (cang-ying hu or just ying hu). These words do not mean "jumping spider." They mean something like "blue fly tiger" (as in blue bot fly I guess) or just "fly tiger," i.e., they are predators of pesky flies just as tigers are predators of deer and other large mammals.

What are called "tarantulas" in the U.S. are in some places called "bird-eating spider." No spider eats more than the occasional bird, and not all spiders that do eat the occasional bird are tarantulas. "Tarantulas" is not a very good name, historically at least, because the name "tarantula" originally was given to a kind of wolf spider that is found in the region around the Italian city of Taranto. The scientific name for that kind of wolf spider is Lycosa tarantula and the general name in Latin for the "bird-eating" kind is Theraphosidae.

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12y ago

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