Crawling

How to spell crawling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crawling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crawling mean?

1. verbMoving forward slowly, either on hands and knees or at a frustratingly low pace.
2. adjectiveCovered with or full of moving creatures, used in the phrase 'crawling with'.

Crawling in a sentence

• verb

  The baby was crawling across the living room floor toward the sofa.

• adjective

  The neglected pantry was crawling with ants by the end of summer.

• verb

  Rush hour traffic was crawling along the motorway at walking pace.

• adjective

  The festival site was crawling with security staff all weekend.

Where does crawling come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the present participle of the verb 'crawl', which English took from Old Norse during the medieval period, when Scandinavian speech left a deep mark on the language of northern England. The Old Norse source 'krafla' meant 'to claw or scrape with the hands', a vivid image of fingers dragging the body forward over the ground. By the 1200s the word had settled into Middle English with the familiar sense of creeping along on hands and knees or belly. Over time it broadened to cover anything that moves painfully slowly, such as queuing traffic, and it also picked up the sense of a surface 'crawling' with swarming insects. The spelling keeps the 'aw' that mirrors the long open vowel, and the single 'l' before '-ing' (unlike doubled forms such as 'travelling') is the small point worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• crawl (to move on hands and knees; from Old Norse krafla 'to claw')
• -ing (present participle / verbal suffix)