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crawl

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[ UK /kɹˈɔːl/ ]
[ US /ˈkɹɔɫ/ ]
VERB
  1. move slowly; in the case of people or animals with the body near the ground
    The crocodile was crawling along the riverbed
  2. show submission or fear
  3. be full of
    The old cheese was crawling with maggots
  4. feel as if crawling with insects
    My skin crawled--I was terrified
  5. swim by doing the crawl
    European children learn the breast stroke; they often don't know how to crawl
NOUN
  1. a very slow movement
    the traffic advanced at a crawl
  2. a swimming stroke; arms are moved alternately overhead accompanied by a flutter kick
  3. a slow mode of locomotion on hands and knees or dragging the body
    a crawl was all that the injured man could manage
    the traffic moved at a creep
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How To Use crawl In A Sentence

  • “‘Now, gentlemen, standing up here before you, I feel a good deal like Pat, and maybe after I’ve spieled along for a while, I may feel so darn small that I’ll be able to crawl into a Pullman hammock with no trouble at all, at all! Chapter 14
  • Turning downriver, she kept the revs low, Night Watch just noodling along at a crawl. CORMORANT
  • Mack and I dove on the ground and began to crawl forward.
  • Our reaction to a tickling sensation may have arisen from a defence against creepy-crawlies. Times, Sunday Times
  • We crawled along a broadish wall, with an inch or two of powdery snow on it, and then up a sloping buttress on to the flat roof of the house. Greenmantle
  • Klimt's tentative chalk and pencil strokes do little more than outline and emphasize the foreshortened legs, buttocks and genitalia of his subjects, their scrawled lifelessness compromising the images' erotic impact. Modernism's Austrian Rebels
  • Eventually, the besotted warriors either passed out or crawled away as the torches guttered and smoked into mere embers.
  • Small birds flitted in the shade of the branches and bees were crawling over the red and white clover.
  • The letters were carved in a cramped scrawl, moonlight etching the crevices and staining the shadows silver.
  • It would be wonderful to crawl into bed, to ask Matron for an aspirin.
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