{
    "term": "crawl",
    "partOfSpeech": "verb",
    "ox5000": true,
    "cefr": "c1",
    "verbForms": {
        "presentSimple": {
            "iYouWeThey": "crawl",
            "heSheIt": "crawls"
        },
        "pastSimple": "crawled",
        "pastParticiple": "crawled",
        "ingForm": "crawling"
    },
    "definitions": [
        {
            "senseNumber": 1,
            "definition": "to move forward on your hands and knees or with your body close to the ground",
            "sensetop": "(+ adv./prep.)",
            "cefr": "c1",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "Our baby is just starting to crawl."
                },
                {
                    "text": "A man was crawling away from the burning wreckage."
                },
                {
                    "text": "She crawled under the fence."
                },
                {
                    "text": "As night fell, we managed to crawl back to our lines."
                },
                {
                    "text": "Has the baby started to crawl yet?"
                },
                {
                    "text": "We spent an hour crawling around on our hands and knees looking for the key."
                },
                {
                    "text": "She was forced to crawl along through the thickening mist."
                }
            ],
            "topics": ["Life stages"],
            "collocations": {
                "adverb": ["quickly", "slowly", "about"],
                "verb + crawl": ["manage to", "start to"],
                "preposition": ["across", "along", "into"],
                "phrases": ["crawl on (your) hands and knees"]
            }
        },
        {
            "senseNumber": 2,
            "definition": "when an insect, a spider, etc. crawls, it moves forward on its legs",
            "sensetop": "(+ adv./prep.)",
            "cefr": "c1",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "There's a spider crawling up your leg."
                }
            ],
            "topics": ["Insects, worms, etc."]
        },
        {
            "senseNumber": 3,
            "definition": "to move forward very slowly",
            "sensetop": "(+ adv./prep.)",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "The traffic was crawling along."
                },
                {
                    "text": "The weeks crawled by."
                },
                {
                    "text": "The traffic was crawling as I left the city."
                },
                {
                    "text": "The taxi crawled to a halt."
                }
            ],
            "collocations": {
                "adverb": ["quickly", "slowly", "about"],
                "verb + crawl": ["manage to", "start to"],
                "preposition": ["across", "along", "into"],
                "phrases": ["crawl on (your) hands and knees"]
            }
        },
        {
            "senseNumber": 4,
            "definition": "to be too friendly or helpful to somebody in authority, in a way that is not sincere, especially in order to get an advantage from them",
            "sensetop": "crawl (to somebody)",
            "labels": "(informal, disapproving)",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "She's always crawling to the boss."
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "senseNumber": 5,
            "definition": "to search the internet in order to record and list data",
            "sensetop": "crawl something",
            "labels": "(computing)",
            "cefr": "c2",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "A protocol controls which pages a web crawler will crawl."
                }
            ],
            "topics": ["Phones, email and the internet"]
        },
        {
            "senseNumber": null,
            "definition": "if you say that somebody comes/crawls out of the woodwork, you mean that they have suddenly appeared in order to express an opinion or to take advantage of a situation",
            "labels": "(informal, disapproving)",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "When he won the lottery, all sorts of distant relatives came out of the woodwork."
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "senseNumber": null,
            "definition": "to make you feel afraid or full of horror",
            "examples": [
                {
                    "text": "Just the sight of him makes my skin crawl."
                }
            ],
            "topics": ["Feelings"]
        }
    ],
    "pronunciations": {
        "uk": [
            {
                "pronunciation": "/krɔːl/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawl__gb_1.mp3"
            },
            {
                "pronunciation": "/krɔːlz/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawls__gb_1.mp3"
            },
            {
                "pronunciation": "/krɔːld/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawled__gb_1.mp3"
            },
            {
                "pronunciation": "/ˈkrɔːlɪŋ/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawling__gb_1.mp3"
            }
        ],
        "us": [
            {
                "pronunciation": "/krɔːl/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawl__us_1.mp3"
            },
            {
                "pronunciation": "/krɔːlz/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawls__us_1.mp3"
            },
            {
                "pronunciation": "/krɔːld/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawled__us_1.mp3"
            },
            {
                "pronunciation": "/ˈkrɔːlɪŋ/",
                "audio": "cr/crawl/crawling__us_1.mp3"
            }
        ]
    },
    "wordOrigin": "Middle English: of unknown origin; possibly related to Swedish kravla and Danish kravle."
}