Word.ws English Dictionary

asprawl

/əˈspɹɔːl/

asprawl adjective: sprawling; covered or filled (with something sprawling).

Adjective

asprawl (not comparable)

  1. Sprawling; covered or filled (with something sprawling).
    • […] he saw […] a man lying flat upon his face upon the ground, with his arms and legs all asprawl.1887, Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, New York and London: Street & Smith, Part 2, Chapter 4, p. 129
    • […] Milton […] fully clothed, asprawl on the couch, lay snoring with a soft, blubbering sound,1951, William Styron, chapter 1, in Lie Down in Darkness, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, page 24

Preposition

asprawl

  1. Sprawling over or across.
    • All through the night which followed her panic flight from the huge, heavy-footed figure that had groped out for her, called to her, and dropped asprawl her own small cloak in the doorway, Denny Bolton’s blood-soiled face and drunkenly reckless laugh had been with her,1914, Larry Evans, chapter 11, in Once to Every Man, New York: H. K. Fly, pages 151–152
    • Hundreds were asprawl the open space between the Cross and the kirkyard.1947, James Barke, The Song in the Green Thorn Tree, London: Collins, Part 1, p. 78

Examples of asprawl in a sentence

  • […] I see a bicycle asprawl in abandon among the ferns, handlebars turned sideways and its front wheel jutting up at a somehow unseemly angle,2005, John Banville, The Sea, London: Picador, Part 1, p. 113:
  • From a distance the wood looked like a cloak, flung carelessly asprawl the shoulder of the hill,1977, Ewan Clarkson, chapter 3, in The Badgers of Summercombe,, New York: Dutton, page 18:
  • […] she thought that not for anything would she wish him to see her naked thus, naked and cut, asprawl a windowsill.1994, Edna O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, page 147:

Origin of asprawl

From a- + sprawl.

Words that rhyme with asprawl

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about asprawl

What does asprawl mean?
Asprawl means sprawling; covered or filled (with something sprawling).
How do you use asprawl in a sentence?
[…] I see a bicycle asprawl in abandon among the ferns, handlebars turned sideways and its front wheel jutting up at a somehow unseemly angle,
What part of speech is asprawl?
Asprawl can be an adjective or a preposition.
How do you pronounce asprawl?
Asprawl is pronounced /əˈspɹɔːl/.

Words near asprawl in the dictionary

  1. asporulation
  2. asposed to
  3. asposta
  4. aspout
  5. aspoxicillin
  6. asprawl
  7. Aspray
  8. aspread
  9. aspredinid
  10. aspredinids
  11. asprin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: asprawl (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “asprawl.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/asprawl. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.