crawled

Crawled is the past tense and past participle of the verb crawl. The primary senses describe movement close to the ground or along a surface, typically on hands and knees or by dragging the body. It can refer to living beings such as babies, insects, reptiles, or worms, as well as to inanimate objects that move slowly. The term is also used metaphorically to describe slow, laborious progress or a creeping, gradual motion.

In computing, to crawl means to systematically browse the web with an automated program, commonly called a web crawler or spider. When a site is crawled, its pages are discovered and indexed for search engines. Crawling behavior is guided by rules and conventions, including robots.txt to control access and rate limits to manage traffic. Crawlers may recrawl pages to detect updates and keep indices current.

In swimming, the crawl refers to the front crawl, a popular stroke. The past tense usage, as in “she crawled the length of the pool,” describes someone swimming using that technique.

Other uses describe slow or creeping progress in various contexts, such as traffic that crawls during peak hours or a project timeline that crawls forward rather than advancing quickly. The term is versatile across everyday, technical, and specialized domains, retaining the core sense of gradual movement or progression.