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
Despite being a dungeon crawler, the series has an unusually explicit focus on food.
From Salon ● Jul. 22, 2024
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
He was probably chanting, “Got to be self-reliant” the day he climbed into a crawler and tore into the fields of satin wheat.
From "Educated" by Tara Westover
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
But Cloudflare argues AI breaks the unwritten agreement between publishers and crawlers.
From BBC ● Jul. 1, 2025
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
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
“The crawlers are not known for their fighting ability,” said Vikus, by way of explanation to Gregor.
From "Gregor the Overlander" by Suzanne Collins
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
