Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To sit or lie with the body and limbs spread out awkwardly.
- v. To spread out in a straggling or disordered fashion: untidy tenements sprawling toward the river.
- v. To cause to spread out in a straggling or disordered fashion.
- n. A sprawling position or posture.
- n. Haphazard growth or extension outward, especially that resulting from real estate development on the outskirts of a city: urban sprawl.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To toss the limbs about; work the arms and legs convulsively; in general, to struggle convulsively.
- To work one's way awkwardly along with the aid. of all the limbs; crawl or scramble.
- To be spread out in an ungraceful posture; be stretched out carelessly and awkwardly.
- To have an irregular, spreading form or outline; straggle: said of handwriting, vines, etc.
- To widen or open irregularly, as a body of cavalry.
- To spread out ungracefully.
- n. The act of sprawling.
- n. A sprawling posture; an awkward recumbent attitude: as, to be stretched out in a careless sprawl.
- n. Motion; activity.
- n. A small twig or branch of a tree; a spray.
- n. Ability to spread one's self or to make a show or ‘splurge’; ‘go.’
Wiktionary
- v. To sit with the limbs spread out.
- v. To spread out in a disorderly fashion; to straggle.
- n. An ungainly sprawling posture.
- n. A straggling, haphazard growth, especially of housing on the edge of a city.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To spread and stretch the body or limbs carelessly in a horizontal position; to lie with the limbs stretched out ungracefully.
- v. To spread irregularly, as vines, plants, or trees; to spread ungracefully, as chirography.
- v. To move, when lying down, with awkward extension and motions of the limbs; to scramble in creeping.
- n. The position or state resulting from sprawling.
WordNet 3.0
- v. go, come, or spread in a rambling or irregular way
- n. an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities
- n. an ungainly posture with arms and legs spread about
- v. sit or lie with one's limbs spread out
Etymologies
- Middle English sprawlen, from Old English sprēawlian, to writhe; see sper- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Theer's more kick an 'sprawl [Footnote: _Kick an' sprawl_ -- Strength, vitality.] in me than theer 'ave bin; an' I feels more hopeful like 'bout the future. ”
“There is the familiar variety of mess, which we call sprawl; but there is another kind of mess that tends towards the singularity--the too-neat desk where the mess has been brought without resolving it into a singularity, where the will-to-mere-neatness has overruled the will-to-actual-order.”
“But the model of their "sprawl" is quite a bit different: Zoom in and look closely; there's agricultural lands and woodland interspersed among the residential areas.”
“But as Austin Bramwell points out at The American Conservative sprawl is also central planning:”
“We also have spontaneous interactions with our neighbors, to a much greater degree than people living in sprawl-style suburbs.”
“As soon as he posted his rude reply, the blogosphere lit up with arguments from progressive, conservative, and even libertarian writers claiming that sprawl is the result of central planning [...]”
“The evidence that sprawl is the result of zoning strikes me as being rather weak.”
“The authors of Suburban Nation tell Gore and Bush to listen up — the antidote to sprawl is good old-fashioned town planning”
“There may be some sprawl still (if sprawl is considered low-density growth as pointed out to me in another post), but nothing compared to the growth in density.”
“Their sprawl is so that even their suburbs have become major cities or metro areas: San Jose and Oakland with SF, Newark and Long Island with NYC, and Yokohama and Chiba with Tokyo.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘sprawl’.
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fight
words for fighting
( open list, randomness )bout, fight, match, smackdown, blue, stoush, battle, clash, fuss, fray, ruckus, tussle and 115 more...
-
Reading 2nd Round
fugitive, hearth, elixir, perpetrator, surreal, tavern, stalk, strut, duress, cavil, intriguing, banister and 10 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, S
scrunch, solace, sabotage, saccade, sacerdotal, sacrilegious, sacristy, snappy, skew, steadfast, scowl, scorch and 781 more...
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(more or less) Temporary Urth List
Temporary list is temporary.
Collecting a few words here, which are then to be alloted to other lists.vassal, gnaw, putrescence, liege, pederasty, disseminate, loot, waning, fitful, hiatuse, plow, pious and 292 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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spread out, spacious words of spe
words pertaining to the root spe- (hope) with some allegorical liberties.
paten, pan, pass, patent, petal, expand, repand, passacaglia, passe, paseo, paella, spawn and 150 more...
-
words found to be generally pleasing
alabaster, mahogany, camphor, coalesce, spire, portmanteau, gadabout, palaver, dolor, dour, dun, luminesce and 610 more...
-
newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
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beatricks's Words
tremendous, naiad, thrush, samsara, thronging, nascent, broom, aristeia, streak, susurrant, reverberate, resistentialism and 352 more...
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Reading Reading
Words from the works of Peter Reading - at least one from each (except the Schwitters-esque erosions, cut-ups etc).
overbright, pimpled, muskiness, effuse, stoup, maul, unlevel, viscid, perfidious, glibly, aloes, drouth and 449 more...
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Vocab++
Words as I learn them.
fetid, mezzanine, hiatus, austerity, subliminal, resplendent, implacable, impugn, debase, exiguous, cirque, holster and 2538 more...
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GRE list 1
Bloviate, Bacchanalia, mirth, covet, inconsequential, prescient, heresy, revelry, modality, gentrify, vitiate, tantalize and 182 more...
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kmalladi's favorites
edification, penchant, ablution, extricate, frank, triumvirate, trifecta, egregious, hoi polloi, articulate, antediluvian, brusque and 291 more...
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Reading Random
Got unknown words randomly
delinquency, modicum, dissuade, incendiary, destitute, lachrymose, plight, ruse, empirical, pedantic, demography, giggle and 444 more...
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supplementary
for enhancement of any English test
consanguineous, worldly, naiveté, enshroud, pernicious, prerogative, traitor, fledgling, vengeance, provision, furnish, quarrel and 94 more...
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Wrapped up in books
I'm reading books. And there are words and phrases I come upon for the first time, or that are used with usages that are new to me.
So, this is just a plain list of those words. Don't expect ...hobble, mackerel, crone, cavort, hoyden, rheumy, scatter, hiss, recoil, trundle, shatter, flaxen and 200 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for sprawl.
Ed_Jogg
The Quality Of Sprawl
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:
that's idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.
Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That's Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.
Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official's desk with a chain saw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said to might be sprawl.
Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them.
Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don't include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.
Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours' best bed in spurs and oilskins,
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it's Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would that it were more so.
No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
by Les Murray.
The great Australian poet 'by whom our language lives' Feb 9, 2011
yarb Señor García
descends a staircase
hopping on one hand.
Three steps down,
not unnaturally,
he sprains his wrist
and sprawls in the sawdust.
- Peter Reading, The Terrestrial Globe, from Diplopic, 1983 Jun 29, 2008