Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To sit or lie with the body and limbs spread out awkwardly.
- intransitive verb To spread out in a straggling or disordered fashion.
- intransitive verb To cause to spread out in a straggling or disordered fashion.
- noun A sprawling position or posture.
- noun A usually disorderly or haphazard mass, array, or extension.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act of sprawling.
- noun A sprawling posture; an awkward recumbent attitude: as, to be stretched out in a careless sprawl.
- noun Motion; activity.
- To toss the limbs about; work the arms and legs convulsively; in general, to struggle convulsively.
- To work one's way awkwardly along with the aid. of all the limbs; crawl or scramble.
- To be spread out in an ungraceful posture; be stretched out carelessly and awkwardly.
- To have an irregular, spreading form or outline; straggle: said of handwriting, vines, etc.
- To widen or open irregularly, as a body of cavalry.
- To spread out ungracefully.
- noun A small twig or branch of a tree; a spray.
- noun Ability to spread one's self or to make a show or ‘splurge’; ‘go.’
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The position or state resulting from sprawling.
- intransitive verb To spread and stretch the body or limbs carelessly in a horizontal position; to lie with the limbs stretched out ungracefully.
- intransitive verb To spread irregularly, as vines, plants, or trees; to spread ungracefully, as chirography.
- intransitive verb To move, when lying down, with awkward extension and motions of the limbs; to scramble in creeping.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To
sit with thelimbs spread out . - verb To spread out in a
disorderly fashion; tostraggle . - noun An
ungainly sprawlingposture . - noun A
straggling ,haphazard growth , especially ofhousing on theedge of acity .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb go, come, or spread in a rambling or irregular way
- noun an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities
- noun an ungainly posture with arms and legs spread about
- verb sit or lie with one's limbs spread out
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Theer's more kick an 'sprawl [Footnote: _Kick an' sprawl_ -- Strength, vitality.] in me than theer 'ave bin; an' I feels more hopeful like 'bout the future. "
Lying Prophets Eden Phillpotts 1911
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There is the familiar variety of mess, which we call sprawl; but there is another kind of mess that tends towards the singularity--the too-neat desk where the mess has been brought without resolving it into a singularity, where the will-to-mere-neatness has overruled the will-to-actual-order.
Archive 2007-04-01 Adam Roberts Project 2007
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There is the familiar variety of mess, which we call sprawl; but there is another kind of mess that tends towards the singularity--the too-neat desk where the mess has been brought without resolving it into a singularity, where the will-to-mere-neatness has overruled the will-to-actual-order.
Mess Adam Roberts Project 2007
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But the model of their "sprawl" is quite a bit different: Zoom in and look closely; there's agricultural lands and woodland interspersed among the residential areas.
Welcome, viewers in Villers-le-Bouillet! (Jack Bog's Blog) 2009
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As soon as he posted his rude reply, the blogosphere lit up with arguments from progressive, conservative, and even libertarian writers claiming that sprawl is the result of central planning [...]
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The evidence that sprawl is the result of zoning strikes me as being rather weak.
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The evidence that sprawl is the result of zoning strikes me as being rather weak.
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The authors of Suburban Nation tell Gore and Bush to listen up — the antidote to sprawl is good old-fashioned town planning
The Great Reset 2009
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But as Austin Bramwell points out at The American Conservative sprawl is also central planning:
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We also have spontaneous interactions with our neighbors, to a much greater degree than people living in sprawl-style suburbs.
yarb commented on the word sprawl
Señor García
descends a staircase
hopping on one hand.
Three steps down,
not unnaturally,
he sprains his wrist
and sprawls in the sawdust.
- Peter Reading, The Terrestrial Globe, from Diplopic, 1983
June 29, 2008
Ed_Jogg commented on the word sprawl
The Quality Of Sprawl
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:
that's idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.
Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That's Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.
Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official's desk with a chain saw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said to might be sprawl.
Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them.
Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don't include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.
Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours' best bed in spurs and oilskins,
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it's Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would that it were more so.
No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
by Les Murray.
The great Australian poet 'by whom our language lives'
February 9, 2011