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Crawl vs Cacography - What's the difference?

crawl | cacography |

As nouns the difference between crawl and cacography

is that crawl is the act of moving slowly on hands and knees etc, or with frequent stops or crawl can be a pen or enclosure of stakes and hurdles for holding fish while cacography is bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect.

As a verb crawl

is to creep; to move slowly on hands and knees, or by dragging the body along the ground.

crawl

English

Etymology 1

From (etyl) crawlen, (m), ‘to scratch, scrape’. More at (l).

Verb

(en verb)
  • To creep; to move slowly on hands and knees, or by dragging the body along the ground.
  • * Grew
  • A worm finds what it searches after only by feeling, as it crawls from one thing to another.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)
  • , chapter=7 citation , passage=‘Children crawled over each other like little grey worms in the gutters,’ he said. ‘The only red things about them were their buttocks and they were raw. Their faces looked as if snails had slimed on them and their mothers were like great sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared. […]’}}
  • To move forward slowly, with frequent stops.
  • To act in a servile manner.
  • * Shakespeare
  • hath crawled into the favour of the king
  • See crawl with.
  • To feel a ing sensation.
  • To swim using the crawl stroke.
  • To move over an area on hands and knees.
  • To visit while becoming inebriated.
  • To visit files or web sites in order to index them for searching.
  • Derived terms
    * crawler
    Descendants
    * German:

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • The act of moving slowly on hands and knees etc, or with frequent stops
  • A rapid swimming stroke with alternate overarm strokes and a fluttering kick
  • (television, film) A piece of horizontally scrolling text overlaid on the main image.
  • * 22 March 2012 , Scott Tobias, AV Club The Hunger Games [http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-hunger-games,71293/]
  • The opening crawl (and a stirring propaganda movie) informs us that “The Hunger Games” are an annual event in Panem, a North American nation divided into 12 different districts, each in service to the Capitol, a wealthy metropolis that owes its creature comforts to an oppressive dictatorship.
    Derived terms
    * front crawl * pub crawl * urban crawl

    Etymology 2

    Compare kraal.

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A pen or enclosure of stakes and hurdles for holding fish.
  • ----

    cacography

    English

    Alternative forms

    *kakography

    Noun

  • Bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect.
  • *1846 , Gabriel Surenne, A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric , IV.4.1:
  • *:A phrase exhibits proofs of cacography , when the accents are misplaced, forgotten, or used erroneously.
  • *1999 , Jack Schofield, The Guardian , 25 Feb 1999:
  • *:In 1997, two American entrepreneurs, Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, formed a company called Typo.net to try to profit from Web surfers' cacography .
  • *2003 , Onwuchekwa Jemie (ed.), Yo' Mama! , p. 10:
  • *:The soul of dialect is cacography , the deliberate misspelling of words for comic effect, which is the written equivalent of the malapropism.
  • Poor or illegible handwriting.
  • *1904 , John Rexford, What Handwriting Indicates , pp. 90-91:
  • *:Many illegible letters is the sign of disorder, and the illegibility of Greeley's cacography has furnished numberless anecdotes.
  • *2002 , Mil Millington, The Guardian , 29 Jun 2002:
  • *:Germans write a "1" so it's easy to confuse it with a "7": mathematics and cacography can leave Margret and I not speaking to each other for a week.
  • *2010 , Martin L. Buxbaum, Negotiations with the Sniper: Book One , p. 63:
  • *:I don't even recognize the handwriting – kind of a scrawled, almost illegible cacography with the letters slanting haphazardly in all directions.
  • Derived terms

    * cacographer * cacographic * cacographical

    Antonyms

    * (poor spelling system) orthography * (poor handwriting) calligraphy

    See also

    * illegible * indecipherable * indistinct * obscure * scrawled * unclear * undecipherable * unreadable