crawler

noun

crawl·​er ˈkrȯ-lər How to pronounce crawler (audio)
plural crawlers
1
: someone or something that crawls: such as
a
: a small organism (such as an insect or worm) that typically moves along close to or on the ground
He won $600 last year for eating a worm. … He devoured the crawler in Yakult, Japan. …Janine Zuniga Irvine
That's when he [Cam Lyons] remembered hearing about dogs that are trained to sniff for bedbugs. If a dog could hunt and find those tiny crawlers, he thought, why not weevils?Ron Charles
see also creepy crawler, night crawler
b
informal + often humorous : a young child
especially : a young child that crawls but does not yet walk
Attention moms, dads, grandparents, uncles and aunts. Sign up your little crawler and toddler for the annual Corn Fest Diaper Derby-Toddler Trot … The Midweek (Sycamore, Illinois)
Knee pads for babies! … the embroidered patella buffers … are designed to keep your little crawler boo-boo free. Jill Radsken
c
: someone who participates in crawls (see crawl entry 2 sense 1d)
Each pub crawler will receive a free hot toddy in a … mug.Susan Sprague Yeske
Just a few quick steps away on Fourth Avenue, the Dream Hotel and the Bobby Hotel have added art exhibits for art crawlers to enjoy.Janet Kurtz
2
: a vehicle (such as a crane) that travels on endless (see endless sense 3) chain belts
… a crawler crane and other equipment were used while the tower crane was out of commission.Chase Rogers
For more than 40 years, the twin crawler-transporters at NASA's Kennedy Space Center have traveled the gravel track between the massive Vehicle Assembly Building and the two launch pads at Launch Complex 39.Cheryl L. Mansfield
3
: software that automatically visits and indexes websites for future search engine or database queries
Publishers usually have a small amount of traffic coming from search engine crawlersAugustine Fou
see also web crawler

Examples of crawler in a Sentence

he's always the crawler who makes everyone else late
Recent Examples on the Web Of a search engine’s parts, which include things such as web crawlers, ranking algorithms and the search interface itself, the index may be the most difficult to create. Ben Guarino, Scientific American, 2 Oct. 2024 Elsewhere, companies like Cloudflare have rolled out tools to detect and block AI crawler bots from scraping websites without consent in an effort to protect content creators from having their data used for training and to help prevent website owners from facing massive surges in their ISP bills. Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes, 24 Sep. 2024 Also contributing to DuckDuckGo’s results are its web crawler—a bot that scans the Internet to help pull in relevant information—and data from niche search engines. Ben Guarino, Scientific American, 2 Oct. 2024 Microsoft confirmed Thursday in a statement that Bing's crawlers are no longer perusing Reddit. Kate Irwin, PCMAG, 25 July 2024 See all Example Sentences for crawler 

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'crawler.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

First Known Use

1607, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Time Traveler
The first known use of crawler was in 1607

Dictionary Entries Near crawler

Cite this Entry

“Crawler.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crawler. Accessed 31 Oct. 2024.

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