These self-satisfied cotton manufacturers and merchants had reason to be smug: They stood at the center of a world-spanning empire—the empire of cotton.
This is a sentence from the book Empire of Cotton. I looked up world-spanning, but it apparently doesn't exist in dictionaries. A post on WordReference suggests it possibly means worldwide. What does this word mean exactly? And how common is it?
The word world-spanning is formed by analogy so that it, and its analogues, are not always going to be found in a dictionary. The empire is one that spans the world.
Such compounds can be pretty much coined as needed, though some are "ready made" collocations.
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