crawler
Americannoun
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crawlers
plural
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a person or thing that crawls.
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Digital Technology. web crawler.
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Also called crawler tractor. any of various large, heavy vehicles or machines that are propelled on endless belts or tracks, especially as used in construction.
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Often crawlers. a garment with long pants, short sleeves or suspender straps, and sometimes feet for a baby who does not yet walk.
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Australian Slang. sycophant.
noun
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slang a servile flatterer
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a person or animal that crawls
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an informal name for earthworm
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a computer program that is capable of performing recursive searches on the Internet
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(plural) a baby's overalls; rompers
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of crawler
1640–50; 1925–30 crawler for def. 4; crawl 1 + -er 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Traveling at a top speed of just 0.82 mph, the crawler moved the massive Moon rocket steadily toward the launch pad.
From Science Daily ● Jan. 19, 2026
When the crew of the colonization mission discover that their new home, an ice planet called Niflheim, is inhabited by armadillo-like crawler creatures, they wonder what to do about this unanticipated roadblock in their efforts.
From Salon ● Mar. 25, 2025
When Supergiant Games was wrapping up Hades, a mythologically rich hack-and-slash dungeon crawler it had spent more than three years developing, the studio concluded it was not quite done.
From New York Times ● May 13, 2024
Or, maybe, the featured Google snippet will tell you that eggs can melt, thanks to a nonsense Quora answer caught in the search crawler.
From Slate ● Feb. 2, 2024
There was also the problem of them putting the odd item they found in the dust into their mouths; I saved the lives of a couple of beetles and a disoriented night crawler that way.
From "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly
Meanwhile, Time is helping advertisers get their messages in front of bots, using a sort of Trojan horse approach—creating text-based ads that regular readers never see but that AI crawlers might find.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 22, 2026
If there’s been an even more difficult task than policing predatory A.I. crawlers, it’s been keeping Reddit interactions personal, healthy, and as bot-free as possible.
From Slate ● Jun. 23, 2025
Mr Srinivas denied accusations that its crawlers ignored robots.txt instructions in an interview with Fast Company last June.
From BBC ● Jun. 20, 2025
When Adam Cooper came across an old junkyard filled with RVs and rock crawlers in South Central, he immediately saw its potential.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 28, 2024
“If you add up all the players in the prophecy, two over, two under, two fliers, two crawlers, two spinners, one gnawer, and one lost, you have twelve,” said Vikus gravely.
From "Gregor the Overlander" by Suzanne Collins
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
