CRAWLING • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Crawling

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/krˈɔlɪŋ/ Listen

verb

Crawl v. i. (past & past part. crawled; pres. part. crawling)

To move slowly by drawing the body along the ground, as a worm; to move slowly on hands and knees; to creep. "A worm finds what it searches after only by feeling, as it crawls from one thing to another."

Hence, To move or advance in a feeble, slow, or timorous manner. "He was hardly able to crawl about the room." "The meanest thing that crawl'd beneath my eyes."

To advance slowly and furtively; to insinuate one's self; to advance or gain influence by servile or obsequious conduct. "Secretly crawling up the battered walls." "Hath crawled into the favor of the king." "Absurd opinions crawl about the world."

To have a sensation as of insect creeping over the body; as, the flesh crawls. See Creep, v. i., 7.

See images of 'Crawling'

Etymology of 'Crawling'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Crawling" Quotes from Famous Books

... her. She could resist no longer. She looked at the nasty, horrid, crawling toad, the dumb toad at her feet that ...

— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne

... bit of black rock cropping out of the hill-side. I guess it is about two hundred and fifty yards away, and is about the size a red-skin's head would be if he were crawling through the grass towards us. Will you ...

— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty

... on the rain-swept mountain the prostrate rider had regained his senses and now was crawling painfully towards the road-house. Seen through the dark he would have resembled some misshapen, creeping monster, for he dragged himself, reptile-like, close to the ground. But as he came closer the man heard a cry which the wind seemed guarding from his ear, and, hearing it, he rose and rushed blindly ...

— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... a shriek at intervals and made their clothes flutter like ghosts' shrouds, and in spite of it King's shirt was drenched with sweat, and his fingers ached from clinging as if they were on fire. Crawling against the wind along a wider ledge at the top, they came to a chasm, crossed by a foot-wide causeway. The wind bowled and moaned in it, and the futile lantern rays only suggested unimaginable, things—death the least ...

— King--of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... own man would be away—ill, wounded, dying, for what she knew, without the comfort of any hospital attendance, without physic, with no one to comfort him; but those she hated with a hatred much keener than his were close to her hand, using some friend's house that had been forcibly taken, crawling out into the sun under her eyes, taking the bread from her mouth! Life in Alexandria at this time must have been sad enough. The people were all secessionists, but the town was held by the Northern party. ...

— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

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