GROVELLING

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does grovelling mean? 

• GROVELLING (adjective)
  The adjective GROVELLING has 1 sense:

1. totally submissive

  Familiarity information: GROVELLING used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• GROVELLING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Totally submissive

Synonyms:

cringing; groveling; grovelling; wormlike; wormy

Similar:

submissive (inclined or willing to submit to orders or wishes of others or showing such inclination)

 Context examples 

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

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Johnson must have joined him immediately, so that his abject and grovelling conduct on deck for the past few days had been no more than planned deception.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

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

(White Fang, by Jack London)

He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof, he said, some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver.

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

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)

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)

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)

I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners—and, I married her:—gross, grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)