Creep

How to spell creep

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce creep

What does creep mean?

1. verbTo move slowly, quietly, or stealthily, keeping low or trying not to be noticed.
2. nounAn unpleasant, unsettling, or untrustworthy person who makes others feel uncomfortable.
3. nounA slow, often unwanted increase or spread that happens almost unnoticed.

Creep in a sentence

• verb

  She tried to creep past the sleeping baby without making a sound.

• noun

  The new manager turned out to be a real creep who read everyone's emails.

• noun

  The project suffered from scope creep as new features were added every week.

• verb

  The cat would creep along the fence before pouncing on the leaves.

• noun

  She blocked the creep who kept messaging her after she said no.

• noun

  Managers worried about the steady creep in monthly running costs.

Where does creep come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Creep descends from the Old English verb creopan, which meant to crawl or to move with the body kept low to the ground, the way a reptile or an insect travels. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives in Dutch kruipen and the Old Norse word that gave us the same low, stealthy idea, all reaching back to a root suggesting a bent or hunched motion. For centuries the word kept that literal sense of slow physical movement, and from there it grew the figurative meaning of advancing gradually and almost unnoticed, as in costs that creep upward. The modern slang noun for an unpleasant, unsettling person is a much later development, recorded from the late nineteenth century, drawing on the shiver-inducing idea of something that makes your skin crawl. Because the word simply doubles the vowel as -ee-, it rarely troubles spellers, though the long-vowel rule it follows is worth noticing.

How the word is built

• creep (from Old English creopan: to crawl, move with the body close to the ground)