Past tense of crawl
regular verb
The past tense of crawl is crawled. The past participle is also crawled.
Forms of crawl
| Base form (V1) | crawl /kɹɔːl/ |
|---|---|
| Past tense (V2) | crawled |
| Past participle (V3) | crawled |
| Present participle | crawling /ˈkɹɔːlɪŋ/ |
| Third person singular | crawls |
Crawled in a sentence
- Clutching my wounded side, I crawled back to the trench.
- 'Children crawled over each other like little grey worms in the gutters,' he said.1963, Margery Allingham, chapter VII, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC
- Oh my Goddess, I cannot believe that just crawled out of the sink!From the entry oh my Goddess
- Like a cat he crawled through the pines, watching the hen pheasant.2025, Daniel P. Mannix, The Fox and the Hound. From the entry upcraned
- Ten minutes later he crawled up the stairs again with two perfect caffè macchiatos.2021, Peter Scott-Morgan, Peter 2.0, Penguin Books, published 2022. From the entry caffè macchiato
Meaning of crawl
- verb To move by dragging one's body along or close to a surface, like a worm or insect, or on one's hands and knees, like a human baby.
- verb To move or progress slowly or laboriously, or with great difficulty (for example due to feebleness) or frequent stops.
- verb To advance by guile and servility; to act in a servile manner, trying to please someone in order to gain favor.
Questions about the past tense of crawl
- What is the past tense of crawl?
- The past tense of crawl is crawled.
- What is the past participle of crawl?
- The past participle of crawl is crawled.
- Is crawl a regular or irregular verb?
- Crawl is a regular verb: its past tense adds -ed.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: crawl (page history and authors) and the entries of its forms. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws left out forms marked obsolete, archaic, rare or dialectal and added the examples. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this page: “Past tense of crawl.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/past-tense/crawl. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.