crawler
Americannoun
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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
Publishers could also try to protect their content from Google by forbidding its web crawler from sharing any content snippets from their sites.
From New York Times ● Jun. 1, 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
I nod frantically, like a bobble-head strapped to a rock crawler.
From "Starfish" by Akemi Dawn Bowman
And there is growing concern that some AI crawlers are disregarding existing protocols for excluding bots.
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
Some of the observations took twisted turns, like when she began to notice what she called “mass cannibalism” among the red crawlers.
From New York Times ● May 9, 2024
They could always find more crawlers, fliers, and spinners.
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.
