verb, noun
verb [V] [usually +adv./prep.]
1 to move forward on your hands and knees, with your body close to the ground:
Our baby is just starting to crawl. * A man was crawling away from the burning wreckage. * She crawled under the fence.
2 when an insect crawls, it moves forward on its legs:
There's a spider crawling up your leg.
3 to move forward very slowly:
The traffic was crawling along. * The weeks crawled by.
4 ~ (to sb) (informal, disapproving) to be too friendly or helpful to sb in authority, in a way that is not sincere, especially in order to get an advantage from them:
She's always crawling to the boss.
IDIOMS see SKINn., WOODWORK
PHRASALVERBS
be crawling with sth (informal) to be full of or completely covered with people, insects or animals, in a way that is unpleasant:
The place was crawling with journalists. * Her hair was crawling with lice.
Part of speech: noun
1 [sing.] a very slow speed:
The traffic slowed to a crawl.
seealsoPUBCRAWL
2 (often the crawl) [sing.,U] a fast swimming stroke that you do lying on your front moving one arm over your head, and then the other, while kicking with your feet:
a swimmer doing the crawl * He struck out across the pool in a powerful crawl.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for crawl is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is crawl a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, crawl is tagged as noun.
Does crawl appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — crawl appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
