trawl
Americannoun
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Also called trawl net. a strong fishing net for dragging along the sea bottom.
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Also called trawl line. a buoyed line used in sea fishing, having numerous short lines with baited hooks attached at intervals.
verb (used without object)
-
trawls,
present (3rd person singular)
-
trawled,
past participle, past
-
trawling
present participle
-
to fish with a net that drags along the sea bottom to catch the fish living there.
-
to fish with a trawl line.
-
to troll.
verb (used with object)
-
trawls,
present (3rd person singular)
-
trawled,
past participle, past
-
trawling
present participle
-
to catch with a trawl net or a trawl line.
-
to drag (a trawl net).
-
to troll.
noun
verb
-
sea fishing to catch or try to catch (fish) with a trawl net or trawl line
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sea fishing (tr) to drag (a trawl net) or suspend (a trawl line)
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to seek or gather (something, such as information, or someone, such as a likely appointee) from a wide variety of sources
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
trawlsimple
-
trawlssimple
-
have trawledperfect
-
has trawledperfect
-
am trawlingprogressive
-
are trawlingprogressive
-
is trawlingprogressive
-
have been trawlingperfect progressive
-
has been trawlingperfect progressive
Past
-
trawledsimple
-
had trawledperfect
-
was trawlingprogressive
-
were trawlingprogressive
-
had been trawlingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of trawl
1475–85; < Middle Dutch tragel (noun), tragelen (v.); cognate with trail
Explanation
The large net used on a fishing boat is called a trawl, and to fish using this kind of net is to trawl. If you live in a coastal town, you might be able to watch the boats trawl at sunrise. When someone trawls, they don't use a fishing pole. This kind of fishing involves a boat that's rigged with a trawl moving through the water and pulling it behind—trawling, in other words. It can be controversial to trawl, since the net can disturb the ocean floor and inadvertently catch endangered and non-edible fish. Trawl comes from the Middle Dutch traghelen, "to drag," and its Latin root tragula, "dragnet."
Vocabulary lists containing trawl
Tiger Boy
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The Woman All Spies Fear
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Not Here to Be Liked
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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:
Some of the scenes the author dredges up from his deep trawl through Stasi archives are bizarre.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 12, 2026
For those new to the low tide trawl, they are few and far between to begin with.
From BBC ● Jul. 20, 2026
After years of disappointment, a random eBay trawl turned up a surprise offer of the long-lost chocolate mints, with a notice for mint vintage items.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 4, 2026
Some have even ditched fishing altogether because it is more profitable to sell the plastic waste they trawl out of the river, the world's second-most powerful watercourse after the Amazon.
From Barron's ● May 20, 2026
But the next month, before most of the boxes had even been opened, NSA agents went to the Marshall Library to trawl through the Friedmans’ papers.
From "The Woman All Spies Fear" by Amy Butler Greenfield
It trawls through and says, here’s all the things that look a little out of the norm.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 11, 2025
Much of the recent scandal around Prince Andrew has come from the discovery of old emails, including from trawls of Epstein documents in the US.
From BBC ● Oct. 20, 2025
But that number could rise as it trawls through documents handed over by AOG following a court order.
From Reuters ● Oct. 5, 2023
“As AI trawls the ocean of open source, there will be even greater value in landing, with a well-cast fly, the secrets that lie beyond the reach of its nets,” he said.
From Washington Times ● Jul. 19, 2023
Over and over Marie-Laure trawls her fingers through the suds, as though trying to gauge their weight.
From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr
We've trawled through the archives and picked out some of the great group games from years gone by.
From BBC ● Dec. 11, 2023
The varied spread of seafood in the trilobite’s guts led the scientists to conclude that B. incola was an opportunistic scavenger that trawled the seafloor for carcasses and anything slow enough for it to catch.
From Scientific American ● Sep. 28, 2023
He trawled through message boards on sites like Facebook late at night, when it was daytime in America.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 2, 2023
To firm up the link, epidemiologists trawled 20 years of medical records for more than 10 million U.S. military recruits and analyzed some of their stored blood samples.
From Science Magazine ● Dec. 14, 2022
Dinghies, fishing boats, and other nauka passed in the water, and shrimp fishermen trawled blue nets along the shore.
From "Tiger Boy" by Mitali Perkins
While this is by far the largest whale graveyard yet found, fossils found during trawling suggest there could be others off South Africa, the Iberian peninsula and the Crozet islands, said the study.
From Barron's ● Jun. 10, 2026
The ongoing trawling of the best part of 1,500 pages has mileage in it yet and we will continue to read through those documents.
From BBC ● Jun. 1, 2026
Investors trawling for value stocks have also boosted shares of energy and materials names.
From MarketWatch ● Feb. 27, 2026
It’s all he ever wanted to do, since he was around 12 years old and accompanied his father, a mailman and part-time shrimper, as he spent weekends trawling the marshy waters off Louisiana.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 11, 2026
I was trawling through every detail in my mind, every possible misstep, until I caught myself.
From "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson
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.
