What does “hebra” mean in Spanish?

Hebra means a single strand of thread — the fine filament of silk or cotton you thread through a needle. Spanish borrows the image for anything made of interwoven parts: a network of trade routes can grow “hebra por hebra,” strand by strand, and the Ruta de la Seda — literally the “Silk Road” — was exactly that: countless separate paths gradually woven into one route across Eurasia.

This TED-Ed video calls the network “una red de múltiples rutas... conectando... hebra por hebra” — the same thread image, describing a route that stretched more than 8,000 km and over 2,000 years, from the Persian Royal Road to caravans the Mongols actively protected. Spanish also uses the related word hilo for thread — as in perder el hilo, “to lose the thread” of a conversation.