Other forms: trawling, trawls, trawled
To trawl is to drag a net along behind a boat. Trawl for cod, a trawling fleet, trawl the seabed.
Bottom trawling scrapes the seabed and takes everything on it, which is why it is the most argued-over fishing method there is. The word is also used of searching through records — trawl the archives. It came into English from Dutch.
1verbtrawlTo drag a net along behind a boat.
“The fishing boats trawl the North Sea for cod and haddock.”
2verbsearchTo search through a mass of material.
“I trawled through hundreds of old emails to find the receipt.”
trawl is a dragging, or a searching.
From Dutch tragelen, to pull with a towline, from traghel, a dragnet, probably from Latin tragula.
Latin
tragula — dragnet
Middle Dutch
traghelen
Dutch
tragelen — to pull with a towline, trawl
English, today
trawl
Built from
16th century, borrowed from Dutch tragelen (“to pull with a towline, trawl”), from Middle Dutch traghelen, from traghel (“dragnet”) (presumably from Latin tragula (“dragnet”)), and as such root-cognate with English drag and dray.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA