trawl.
A net or dragnet used for trawling.
Meaning & usage
A net or dragnet used for trawling.
A long fishing line having many short lines bearing hooks attached to it; a setline.
An exhaustive search.
I embarked on a trawl through my uncle's papers in search of his missing will.
Where this word comes from
16th century, borrowed from Dutch tragelen (“to pull with a towline, trawl”), from Middle Dutch traghelen, from traghel (“dragnet”) (presumably from Latin tragula (“dragnet”)), and as such root-cognate with English drag and dray.
To take (fish or other marine animals) with a trawl.
The fisherman went out to trawl the deep sea for shrimp.
To fish from a slow-moving boat.
They used a large net to trawl for fish along the coast.
To make an exhaustive search for something within a defined area.
We need to trawl through the data to find meaningful patterns.
Where this word comes from
16th century, borrowed from Dutch tragelen (“to pull with a towline, trawl”), from Middle Dutch traghelen, from traghel (“dragnet”) (presumably from Latin tragula (“dragnet”)), and as such root-cognate with English drag and dray.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.