Library / English Dictionary

SCRAWL

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Poor handwriting

Synonyms:

cacography; scratch; scrawl; scribble

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Hypernyms ("scrawl" is a kind of...):

hand; handwriting; script (something written by hand)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "scrawl"):

chicken scratch (cramped or illegible handwriting)

squiggle (an illegible scrawl)

Derivation:

scrawl (write carelessly)

 II. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Write carelessly

Synonyms:

scrawl; scribble

Classified under:

Verbs of sewing, baking, painting, performing

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

write (mark or trace on a surface)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s
Somebody ----s something

Derivation:

scrawl (poor handwriting)

scrawler (a writer whose handwriting is careless and hard to read)

Credits

 Context examples: 

He held in his hand a sheet of blue paper, scrawled over with notes and figures.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was scrawled over with geometrical diagrams and calculations of some sort.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

They were scrawled with chalk.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I took up the envelope and saw scrawled in red ink upon the inner flap, just above the gum, the letter K three times repeated.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

By hand pressures, after that, he answered our questions, and when he wished to speak he scrawled his thoughts with his left hand, quite legibly, on a sheet of paper.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

And yet the amazing thing is that he must have been there all the time, for when I examined the door again in the morning, he had scrawled some more of his pictures under the line which I had already seen.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Knowing that my wife would be terribly anxious, I slipped off my ring and confided it to the Lascar at a moment when no constable was watching me, together with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause to fear.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)