Library / English Dictionary

GROVEL

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

Irregular inflected forms: grovelled    , grovelling   

 I. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Show submission or fear

Synonyms:

cower; crawl; creep; cringe; fawn; grovel

Classified under:

Verbs of walking, flying, swimming

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)

Credits

 Context examples: 

What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

(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)

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)

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)

Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of men, a male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that grovelled before him and revolted only in drunkenness and in secrecy.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)