GROVEL (grovelled, grovelling)

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

Irregular inflected forms: grovelled    , grovelling   

 Dictionary entry overview: What does grovel mean? 

• GROVEL (verb)
  The verb GROVEL has 1 sense:

1. show submission or fear

  Familiarity information: GROVEL used as a verb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• GROVEL (verb)

Present simple: I / you / we / they grovel    ... he / she / it grovels   
Past simple: groveled    / grovelled   
Past participle: groveled    / grovelled   
-ing form: groveling    / grovelling   

Sense 1

Meaning:

Show submission or fear

Classified under:

Verbs of walking, flying, swimming

Synonyms:

cower; crawl; creep; cringe; fawn; grovel

Hypernyms (to "grovel" is one way to...):

bend; flex (form a curve)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s PP

Derivation:

groveler; groveller (someone who humbles himself as a sign of respect; who behaves as if he had no self-respect)

 Context examples 

It was a grovelling fashion of existence: I should never like to return to it.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

He rolled toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

The colour went from their six faces like enchantment; some leaped to their feet, some clawed hold of others; Morgan grovelled on the ground.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Then, as he turned to leave the room, the captain seized him by the wrist, imploring him, by the memory of their mother, to have mercy upon him; and I loved my master as I saw him drag his sleeve from the grasp of the clutching fingers, and leave the stricken wretch grovelling upon the floor.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed was flat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth wide; but these differences are common to all savage nations, where the lineaments of the countenance are distorted, by the natives suffering their infants to lie grovelling on the earth, or by carrying them on their backs, nuzzling with their face against the mothers’ shoulders.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

He was abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to groveling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth, without affecting any ornaments of learning or of style.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)