Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. One that crawls, especially an early form of certain insect larvae.
- n. A vehicle, such as a bulldozer, that moves on continuous belts of metal plates.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. One who or that which crawls; a creeper; a reptile.
- n. A dobson or hellgrammite; the larva of a neuropterous insect of the family Sialidæ, as of Corydalus cornutus.
- n. Also called clipper.
- n. A person or thing that moves slowly; particularly, a cab that moves along a street very slowly on the outlook for a fare.
Wiktionary
- n. Australia, obsolete A person who is abused, physically or verbally, and returns to the abuser a supplicant.
- n. Australia, slang A sycophant.
- n. A child who is able to creep using his hands and knees but is not able to walk.
- n. sports A crawl swimmer.
- n. A tractor crawler, a motorized vehicle that uses caterpillar tracks instead of wheels.
- n. A software bot that autonomously follows connected paths such as webpage links.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. One who, or that which, crawls; a creeper; a reptile.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a person who tries to please someone in order to gain a personal advantage
- n. a person who crawls or creeps along the ground
- n. terrestrial worm that burrows into and helps aerate soil; often surfaces when the ground is cool or wet; used as bait by anglers
Etymologies
- From crawl (“move slowly, by dragging the body along the ground”) + -er (“suffix forming agent noun”). (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The behavior of the everest crawler is regrettable.”
“The smart crawler is to be free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).”
“At 10: 36 p.m. PDT, Google's "crawler" -- the technology that finds Web pages -- discovered a new link on the Web site of Tribune's South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper in a section called "Popular Stories: Business.”
“In another conciliatory gesture announced Wednesday, Google will use a separate "crawler" -- which is a piece of indexing technology -- to compile content for its news section.”
“Plus whoever has the rights to Spider-Man would never allow him in the movie without a small fortune, so the web-crawler is out too.)”
Did Jon Favreau Just Reveal The Avengers Line-Up? « FirstShowing.net
“Mechanics on the battlefield are built around the idea of a mobile base, called a crawler, which differs depending on which of the three classes you choose.”
“The crawler is your all-in-one building, serving as your sole production structure and research center.”
“And thus we come to the cartoon of Weil on top, as the evolution of the Venezuelan politician, becoming an "arrastrado", that is, a crawler.”
Political opportunism under Chavez: PODEMOS rats changing ships
“Currently, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other top search companies voluntarily respect a Web site's wishes as declared in a text file known as "robots.txt," which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘crawler’.
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Poetic
the blue hour, dinner-pail, long-drawn, pettifog, spoonmeat, crawler, eructate, voiced, medial, tessellated, eyeballs, amphigory and 48 more...
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Gil Blas
Interesting words and usages from Smollett's 1749 translation of Lesage's L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane
reck, durance, rhodomontade, hangdog, trap, lustre, pin, boggle, dandle, birthday suit, colic, gripes and 238 more...
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rig-marole
interesting vehicles
zamboni, unimog, thresher, road train, combine, amphicar, caterpillar, mini moke, semi, lorry, tro tro, yarder and 14 more...
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fiery furnaces
lozel, puce, blacksmith, whiskey, hemlock, keen, penguin, dungeon, hague, mummy, croquet, eucalyptus and 51 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for crawler.

yarb The old crawler, having scribbled through his billet-doux, restrained the luxuriance of a straggling hair or two with his tweezers; then bathed his eyes in the nostrum of some perfumer to give them a brilliancy which their natural gum would have eclipsed.
- Lesage, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, tr. Smollett, bk 4 ch. 7 Sep 18, 2008