Other forms: crawling, crawled, crawls
To crawl is to move along the ground on your hands and knees. A baby crawling across the carpet towards the plug socket; a plumber crawling under the sink with a torch in his teeth.
Insects crawl as well — a spider crawling up the wall, ants crawling over a dropped biscuit — and traffic crawls when nothing is moving: we crawled into town at walking pace. Crawling with means covered and swarming: the kitchen was crawling with ants, the square was crawling with police. Your skin crawls when something disgusts or frightens you. The noun does two jobs, a slow pace and a swimming stroke: traffic slowed to a crawl, and the front crawl is the fast one, arm over arm. A pub crawl is an evening spent going from one pub to the next.
1verbcrawlTo move forward on hands and knees, close to the ground.
“The baby crawled the length of the hallway.”
2verbinsectOf an insect or small creature, to move slowly across a surface.
“A beetle crawled across the page.”
3verbmoveTo move very slowly.
“The traffic crawled all the way to the bridge.”
4verbfullTo be full of moving people or creatures.
“The cupboard was crawling with ants.”
5nounpaceA very slow pace.
“The train slowed to a crawl outside the station.”
6nounfastA fast swimming stroke in which the arms come over the head in turn.
“She swims the crawl for the first two lengths.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Crawl arrived from Old Norse krafla and belongs to a Germanic family of words for scrabbling about; behind it stands *krabbōną, to scratch or scrape, which is also where crab comes from. Danish still has kravle and Swedish kräla for creeping along. The picture inside the word is something scratching its way over the ground, claws and all.
Proto-Indo-European
*gerbʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*krabblōną
Old Norse
krafla
Middle English
crawlen
English, today
crawl
Built from
From Middle English crawlen, crewlen, creulen, crallen, cravelen, from Old Norse krafla (compare Danish kravle (“to crawl, creep”), Swedish kravla, kräla (“to creep, crawl”)), from Proto-Germanic krabblōną (compare stq krabbelje, Dutch krabbelen, German Low German krabbeln, German krabbeln), frequentative of krabbōną (“to scratch, scrape”). Compare also stq krauelje (“to crawl, scuttle”), West Frisian kreauwelje (“to crawl”), Dutch krevelen, krieuwelen (“to crawl”), German Low German kribbeln, German kribbeln (“to creep, crawl, tingle”). See also crab, crabble.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA