crawls

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular present of crawl.

   A wounded climber crawls toward the shelter through the snow.

   The line at the ticket office crawls forward one person at a time.

   Note

   The present-tense form turns up in some fixed frames: a place crawls with insects, a person's skin crawls, traffic crawls along. Nearly all of these are intransitive and take no object. The swimming use is the exception, where a swimmer crawls a length of the pool. Watch the preposition. With marks what swarms, not what is doing the crawling, so the cellar crawls with spiders.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of crawl.

   The charity arranged two pub crawls to raise money for the shelter.

   During gridlock the highway alternates between brief stops and grinding crawls.

   Note

   A regular plural, but not every kind of crawl takes it comfortably. Countable crawls are the easy ones: a night of pub or bar crawls, the news crawls scrolling along the bottom of a screen, and fish crawls, the staked pens for holding fish. The swimming stroke and the slow pace usually stay singular. Swimmers do the crawl and traffic moves at a crawl, so a plural there sounds marked.

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