creep up on

1. Advance slowly or stealthily, as in The cat crept up on the bird, or Autumn is creeping up on us. This expression is recorded in slightly different form——from the 15th century on. One of the Hymns to the Virgin and Christ (c. 1430) has “Now age has cropen [crept] up on me ful stille.”

Example Sentences

“That’s getting dangerously close to half the planet. What Raoul’s film captures — and what Orwell saw so clearly — is how authoritarian ideas don’t arrive overnight. They creep up on us, little by little, as words like ‘democracy’ get redefined to mean whatever those in power want them to mean.”

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As we discover in Parenthood, the mother spider gives her life for her spiderlings, who, when the time is right, slowly but surely creep up on her and their other elderly relatives en masse and eat them alive... making room for the new generation.

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She's young, talented and, before "Mar-a-Lago face" started to creep up on her, she was beautiful.

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Cramps can creep up on those who misjudge their pre-match routine.

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It wasn’t unusual for a hominid child to be picked up and carried away by a harpy eagle or a sabertoothed cat to creep up on a sleeping family, grab an infant and disappear into the night.

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