You know, it is not just spread and gather for which the _wider and _longer suffixes make sense. You could bind a row to the end of an existing row, or at the bottom of a set of rows. Same with columns. So the names of neither "cbind" nor "bind_cols" help if you are trying to remember if it is the right command to bind some columns to the bottom of existing columns.
It seems to me that bind_longer (or blonger) and bind_wider (or bwider) would make more sense, containing as they do their own mnemonics. And really, whether you consider the rectangle of values you want to bind as a set of rows (the experimentalist's view: observations) or as a set of columns (the theorist's view -- variables) the same constraints apply to both if you are binding longer, and likewise if wider. It is the position which determines if you need, e.g., type matching to existing variables. Rows and columns are just two different ways of looking at your data. Wider and longer are two different ways of attaching it.