verb
crawl
krawl
verb
1
To move on hands and knees, or drag the body low along a surface.
"The baby crawled across the living room floor toward her toy."
"Soldiers crawled through the mud to stay below the gunfire."
2
To move or progress very slowly.
"Traffic crawled along the highway during rush hour."
3
For a computer program to automatically visit and index web pages.
"Search engines crawl billions of pages to build their index."
noun
1
A very slow pace, or a tour of several bars in one night ("bar crawl").
"They organized a pub crawl for the birthday celebration."
How to Use Crawl
Learner’s notesIn plain EnglishTo move slowly, close to the ground, or (for traffic or a web bot) to move/progress at a crawl.
Common pairings
crawl on all fours
traffic crawled
web crawl
pub crawl
Word Forms
crawled past tense, crawls plural, crawls plural, crawls singular
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Etymology
From Old Norse krafla, "to crawl or creep" — related to words in Danish and Swedish meaning the same thing.