Crawl

How to spell crawl

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce crawl

What does crawl mean?

1. verbTo move slowly along the ground on hands and knees, or with the body close to a surface.
2. nounA fast swimming stroke performed face down with alternating overarm movements.
3. nounA very slow rate of movement or progress.

Crawl in a sentence

• verb

  The baby learned to crawl across the kitchen floor.

• noun

  She switched from breaststroke to the front crawl to finish faster.

• noun

  The queue at the airport slowed to a crawl after the system crashed.

• verb

  Workers had to crawl through the narrow ventilation duct.

• noun

  His coach spent the morning correcting his crawl technique.

• noun

  Roadworks reduced the morning commute to a frustrating crawl.

Where does crawl come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Crawl is a humble word with northern roots: it came into Middle English from the Old Norse verb krafla, which meant 'to claw' or 'to paw at something', the kind of scrabbling motion an animal makes with its claws against the ground. Scandinavian settlers in northern and eastern England brought a cluster of such everyday body and motion words, and crawl settled in around the 1300s to describe creeping along close to the surface. From the literal sense of moving on hands and knees it spread naturally to traffic that barely moves, time that seems to drag, and skin that seems to creep. In the nineteenth century swimmers borrowed it for the fast face-down stroke now called the front crawl, because the arm action resembles a creeping reach. The spelling stays delightfully phonetic, which is why the only thing that ever trips writers is whether to double that final 'l'.

How the word is built

• crawl (single root verb, from Old Norse krafla 'to paw or claw'); no prefix or suffix