creeping

Pluralcreepings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of creep.

   Fog was creeping over the hills as the evening grew cold.

   She noticed the ivy creeping up the side of the old house.

   Note

   The -ing form keeps every motion of creep: the crawl close to the ground, the spread across a surface, the slow change in one direction. Placed before a noun it works like an adjective for what advances unnoticed. Nigel Harris wrote in RAIL in 2022 of "a creeping tsunami of train cancellations." The spelling hides two Old English words: this one descends from the participle crēopende, the noun for the act from crēopung.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The action or movement of something that advances slowly and stealthily, often low to the ground.

   The steady creeping of the glacier reshaped the valley over centuries.

   A faint creeping of moss covered the damp north wall of the church.

   Similaradvance, crawl, spread

   Note

   A noun that can be counted as well as left abstract. It takes the plural creepings, and Timothy Dwight's Theology, Explained and Defended (1824) sets "the creepings of a worm" beside "the flutterings of an insect", treating each small movement as a separate act. An article or a plural is the easy sign that you have the noun and not the participle, which shares its spelling.

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