Meaning & use
trawl
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Meanings
verbtransitive or intransitive
To catch fish by pulling a large net behind a boat along the sea or lake bottom.
Grammar: Can take an object or not: they trawl the bay / they trawl for cod.
Patterns
- trawl for something
- trawl the sea
Fishing boats trawl for cod in the cold northern waters.
The crew spent the night trawling the bay.
Scientists trawled the deep sea to collect rare species.
verbtransitive or intransitivefigurative
To search carefully and slowly through a lot of material to find something.
Grammar: With an object, or followed by through: she trawled the archives / trawled through the files.
Patterns
- trawl through something
- trawl something for something
Detectives trawled through hours of footage to find the suspect.
I trawled the internet for a replacement part.
Recruiters trawl professional sites for suitable candidates.
nouncountable
A large cone-shaped net pulled along the bottom of the sea to catch fish, or a long, careful search.
Grammar: Countable: a trawl through the records.
Patterns
- a trawl through something
- a deep-sea trawl
The fishermen hauled in the trawl full of silver fish.
A quick trawl through my emails turned up the receipt.
The police carried out a trawl of local records.
Word forms
| third person singular | trawls |
|---|---|
| past tense | trawled |
| past participle | trawled |
| -ing form | trawling |
Common combinations
- trawl the internet
- I had to trawl the internet to find the original article.
- trawl through records
- Officials trawled through old records for evidence.
- trawl for fish
- Boats trawl for fish far offshore.
- trawl net
- The trawl net scraped the sea floor.
- bottom trawling
- Bottom trawling can damage the sea bed.
Synonyms and how they differ
- scour
- Scour suggests looking everywhere with great effort, while trawl suggests sweeping through a large collection.
- comb
- Comb implies a careful, detailed search of an area, whereas trawl suggests a broad sweep that may be less precise.
- sift
- Sift means to examine material to separate useful parts, but trawl focuses on collecting what the search finds.
- rummage
- Rummage is a casual, untidy search through belongings, while trawl suggests a larger or more systematic one.
Word family
Commonly confused: trawl or troll?
trawl vs troll
Troll can also mean to fish by dragging a line, and online it means to post provocative messages, so it should not be used for trawl.
Practice
To find the one message that mattered, the detective had to ___ hundreds of old emails.
Choose one answer.
Trawl means search slowly and thoroughly through a large amount of material. Delete and ignore would destroy or skip the evidence, and forward does not involve searching.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “trawl”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.