Word.ws English Dictionary

grovelled

grovelled is the simple past of grovel.

Meaning of grovel

Verb

grovel (third-person singular simple present grovels, present participle (US) groveling or (UK) grovelling, simple past and past participle (US) groveled or (UK) grovelled)

  1. (intransitive) To be prone on the ground.
  2. (intransitive) To crawl.
    • In the tube station, the old ones who were on the way out / Would dribble and vomit and grovel and shout1985, Shane MacGowan, “The Old Main Drag”, in Rum Sodomy & the Lash, performed by The Pogues
  3. (intransitive) To abase oneself before another person.
    • She refused to grovel in front of the bully, standing her ground.
  4. (intransitive) To be slavishly nice to someone or apologize in the hope of securing something.
    • He had to grovel before his boss after missing the important meeting.
  5. (intransitive) To take pleasure in mundane activities.

Forms of grovelled

alternative formgroveled

Questions about grovelled

What is grovelled the simple past of?
Grovelled is the simple past of grovel.

Words near grovelled in the dictionary

  1. grovelers
  2. groveless
  3. groveling
  4. grovelingly
  5. grovelings
  6. grovelled
  7. groveller
  8. grovellers
  9. grovelling
  10. grovellingly
  11. grovellings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: grovelled (page history and authors); grovel (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.

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