(v. t.) To draw or mark awkwardly and irregularly; to write hastily and carelessly; to scratch; to scribble; as, to scrawl a letter.
(v. i.) To write unskillfully and inelegantly.
(n.) Unskillful or inelegant writing; that which is unskillfully or inelegantly written.
Example Sentences:
(1) Towards the end, as entire eras wheeled past in a blur, I realised the programme itself would outlive me, and began desperately scrawling notes that described the broadcast's initial few centuries for the benefit of any descendants hoping to pick up from where I left off.
(2) I got the job aged 19 because the manager had scrawled "Good hair!"
(3) Oscar Wilde's grave in Paris has put up with a lot in its first century - the flying angel headstone has been castrated (twice), commemorative candles have scorched the front, and multilingual graffiti are regularly scrawled over the tomb.
(4) The paintings by Klimt displayed on these pages are pieces of modern intellectual history to set beside a formula scrawled by Albert Einstein or a score by Arnold Schönberg.
(5) Shortly after Hopkins’s original message, Monroe, a contributor to the Guardian, tweeted in response: “I have NEVER ‘scrawled on a memorial’.
(6) They decided to go for it, and grew wise to the tabloid tactic of cropping out their banners – they began scrawling slogans directly on their breasts.
(7) The tone was light years from "fuck the rich" already scrawled on banks (and an Ann Summers sex shop) down the road.
(8) They arrived in a black Camaro with Dare (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) scrawled on its side in blazing faux graffiti, one officer explaining how his department had seized it from a drug dealer.
(9) Last month I was given unrestricted access to the enormous archive the PCGG has assembled in its years of global detective work: the president’s handwritten diary, frequently puffed with self-regard; the notepaper headed “From the office of the president”, with scribbled sums endlessly totting up his cash; minutes of company meetings with his comments scrawled in the margins; contracts; “side agreements”; records of multiple bank accounts; hundreds of share certificates; private investigators’ reports; and tens of thousands of pages of court judgments.
(10) At their wedding ceremony in 1985, Penn scrawled “Fuck off” in the sand at the media helicopters flying overhead.
(11) Iran-UK relations: 12 moments in a troubled history Read more Sitting a few feet from the scrawl, Philip Hammond, the first British foreign secretary to visit Iran for well over a decade, had come to reopen the embassy , and open a new chapter in Anglo-Iranian affairs.
(12) Facebook Twitter Pinterest A child plays in a destroyed Ukrainian tank, scrawled with the slogan Save the Donbass people from Ukrainian army.
(13) Spoofs are no longer one-off scrawls that fade on individual walls, but community in-jokes that take on a virtual life of their own.
(14) There was a predictable flurry of outrage; the then culture minister Kim Howells, commenting on the exhibition as a whole, scrawled "conceptual bullshit" across a Tate comment card and pinned it to the visitors' wall.
(15) He scrawls "black spider memos" to government ministers, calls secretaries of state into Clarence House for private conversations about policy, and writes confidential notes to high-level contacts to get planning matters changed.
(16) Fulham thought they'd secured the striker's scrawl, but it now seems that Big Sam might be on the verge of throwing a spanner in the works.
(17) On November 5, Chumlong Lemtongthai, a 43-year-old Thai national, put his tightly scrawled signature to a guilty plea that was submitted to a South African court.
(18) That includes the eight-year-old who scrawled his teacher's picture.
(19) Quite soon, I discovered I could balance a notebook on my knee and, with a pencil, scrawl notes about my experience in a big black notebook.
(20) He spots a scrawled reference to the legendary Tina Brown upside down in my notebook across his glass-topped desk.
Sprawl
Definition:
(v. i.) To spread and stretch the body or limbs carelessly in a horizontal position; to lie with the limbs stretched out ungracefully.
(v. i.) To spread irregularly, as vines, plants, or tress; to spread ungracefully, as chirography.
(v. i.) To move, when lying down, with awkward extension and motions of the limbs; to scramble in creeping.
Example Sentences:
(1) Stonehenge stood at the heart of a sprawling landscape of chapels, burial mounds, massive pits and ritual shrines, according to an unprecedented survey of the ancient grounds.
(2) Arvind Kejriwal, leader of a new populist political party "dedicated to improving the lot of the common man", announced on Monday that he would form a government to run the sprawling, troubled and increasingly wealthy city of 15 million people.
(3) Endless utilitarian apartment blocks and gigantic hotels sprawl seemingly at random in the so-called "coastal cluster".
(4) Last night, the trouble spread to the mainly Asian suburb of Manningham, an area of sprawling and deprived terraced housing estates.
(5) Attorneys for people caught on the US’s sprawling terrorism watchlists are expressing concern that the latest tactic by gun control advocates is blessing the legitimacy of a process they say threatens civil rights.
(6) When I arrived, I couldn’t make sense of the sprawling, low-slung place at all.
(7) Near the entrance was a sprawling camp kitchen, with mountains of supplies, indoor and outdoor facilities and open fires on which some of the cooking was done, and all of the gigantic vats of coffee seemed to be boiled.
(8) But as developing the sprawling suburbs has been the guiding planning principle for decades, there is little expertise in neither the public nor the private sector to all of a sudden begin building urban neighbourhoods.
(9) he told the Guardian in his office in a low-rise building inside the sprawling grounds of the Afghan foreign ministry.
(10) As she gazes down from her plane at the sprawling Amazon jungle below, she will hope and pray that, with a number of giant infrastructure projects planned in the region, history is not about to repeat itself.
(11) From his 19th-floor newsroom Eurípedes Alcântara enjoys a spectacular view over the "new Brazil"; helicopters flit through the afternoon sky, shiny new cars honk their way across town, tower blocks and luxury shopping centres sprout like turnips from the urban sprawl.
(12) Their red and black flag flies above several of the tents in Kiev's sprawling downtown protest city; young volunteers – unarmed but wearing khaki fatigues – have commandeered a boutique and a city council office.
(13) Inside, people slept sprawled on the platforms and in the booking hall.
(14) The fossil fuel resistance, like the fossil fuel industry, is protean and sprawling – and each win reverberates for decades to come, because that’s how long pipelines and coal mines are built to last.
(15) They had a sprawling back garden on two tiers and with a steep bank down to the main road below; this was where the big bonfire used to burn.
(16) 10.01pm BST North Avenue Beach From a 95th floor lookout over Chicago's sprawling downtown … to the beach, in under 10 minutes.
(17) They once journeyed six hours out of sprawling Mexico City to deliver an order, using specially designed backpacks that protect the food from the city’s potholed streets.
(18) Tapajós was investigating the head of an illegal gambling cartel, Carlinos Cachoeira – also known as Charlie Waterfall – and his sprawling web of influence.
(19) Wednesday's demonstration flight was mostly carrying representatives from Indonesian airlines, which are rapidly expanding to serve a burgeoning middle class in the sprawling archipelago where air travel between islands is a quicker alternative to ferries.
(20) It's an extraordinary, sprawling world, powered by magic and steampunk technology, populated by humans, cactus-people, insectoid, amphibian and avian races, dripping with myths and monsters and menaced by repressive regimes.