Creep
- n. A slow rising of the floor of a gallery, occasioned by the pressure of incumbent strata upon the pillars or sides; a gradual movement of mining ground.
- v. t. To move along the ground, or on any other surface, on the belly, as a worm or reptile; to move as a child on the hands and knees; to crawl.
- v. t. To move slowly, feebly, or timorously, as from unwillingness, fear, or weakness.
- v. t. To move in a stealthy or secret manner; to move imperceptibly or clandestinely; to steal in; to insinuate itself or one’s self; as, age creeps upon us.
- v. t. To slip, or to become slightly displaced; as, the collodion on a negative, or a coat of varnish, may creep in drying; the quicksilver on a mirror may creep.
- v. t. To move or behave with servility or exaggerated humility; to fawn; as, a creeping sycophant.
- v. t. To grow, as a vine, clinging to the ground or to some other support by means of roots or rootlets, or by tendrils, along its length.
- v. t. To have a sensation as of insects creeping on the skin of the body; to crawl; as, the sight made my flesh creep. See Crawl, v. i., 4.
- v. i. To drag in deep water with creepers, as for recovering a submarine cable.
- n. The act or process of creeping.
- 1n. 1 A slow rising of the floor of a gallery, occasioned by the pressure of incumbent strata upon the pillars or sides; a gradual movement of mining ground.
The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.