crawl

The word “crawl” means to move on hands and knees, or drag the body low along a surface. In plain terms, to move slowly, close to the ground, or (for traffic or a web bot) to move/progress at a crawl.

“Crawl” is pronounced krawl (/kɹɔːl/ in IPA).

Here is “crawl” used in a sentence: “The baby crawled across the living room floor toward her toy.”

Words with a similar meaning to “crawl” include creep, inch, plod, scuttle and wriggle.

The opposite of “crawl” — its antonyms — are run, walk, sprint and lope.

Depending on how it is used, “crawl” can be a verb and a noun.

The word “crawl” comes from Old Norse. From Old Norse krafla, "to crawl or creep" — related to words in Danish and Swedish meaning the same thing.

“Crawl” is an uncommon word in modern English, usually learned at around the B2 level.

Crawl describes moving on hands and knees or dragging the body low along a surface, or more generally progressing very slowly, while crab specifically describes sideways drifting movement, as with an aircraft in a crosswind. Crawl is the broader, more common term for slow or low movement in any direction.

When a computer program crawls the web, it automatically and systematically visits web pages, following links from one page to another, in order to collect and index their content. Search engines rely on this process, often called web crawling, to build the indexes that power search results.

A bar crawl is a social outing in which a group visits several bars in one night, typically having a drink at each stop before moving to the next. The term draws on the noun sense of crawl as a slow, extended journey rather than the physical movement of crawling.