In 1511, leaders in Mecca believed coffee stimulated radical thinking and outlawed the drink. In 1524, the leaders overturned that order, and people could drink coffee again.
CREEPED
Verb
creeped
simple past tense and past participle of creep
Usage notes
• Creeped is less common than crept, except in the past tense of creep someone out.
Anagrams
• precede
Source: Wiktionary
CREEP
Creep (krp), v. t. [imp. Crept (krpt) (Crope (kr, Obs.); p. p. Crept; p. pr. & vb. n. Creeping.] Etym: [OE. crepen, creopen, AS. cre; akin to D. kruipen, G. kriechen, Icel. krjupa, Sw. krypa, Dan. krybe. Cf. Cripple, Crouch.]
1. To move along the ground, or on any other surface, on the belly, as a worm or reptile; to move as a child on the hands and knees; to crawl. Ye that walk The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep. Milton.
2. To move slowly, feebly, or timorously, as from unwillingness, fear, or weakness. The whining schoolboy . . . creeping, like snail, Unwillingly to school. Shak. Like guilty thing, Icreep. Tennyson.
3. To move in a stealthy or secret manner; to move imperceptibly or clandestinely; to steal in; to insinuate itself or one's self; as, age creeps upon us. The sothistry which creeps into most of the books of argument. Locke. Of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women. 2. Tim. iii. 6.
4. To slip, or to become slightly displaced; as, the collodion on a negative, or a coat of varnish, may creep in drying; the quicksilver on a mirror may creep.
5. To move or behave with servility or exaggerated humility; to fawn; as, a creeping sycophant. To come as humbly as they used to creep. Shak.
6. To grow, as a vine, clinging to the ground or to some other support by means of roots or rootlets, or by tendrils, along its length. "Creeping vines." Dryden.
7. To have a sensation as of insects creeping on the skin of the body; to crawl; as, the sight made my flesh creep. See Crawl, v. i.,4.
8. To drag in deep water with creepers, as for recovering a submarine cable.
Creep, n.
1. The act or process of creeping.
2. A distressing sensation, or sound, like that occasioned by the creeping of insects. A creep of undefinable horror. Blackwood's Mag. Out of the stillness, with gathering creep, Like rising wind in leaves. Lowell.
3. (Mining)
Definition: A slow rising of the floor of a gallery, occasioned by the pressure of incumbent strata upon the pillars or sides; a gradual movement of mining ground.
Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition
Recent Word Finds
Word of the Day
24 May 2025
EARTHSHAKING
(adjective) sufficiently significant to affect the whole world; “earthshaking proposals”; “the contest was no world-shaking affair”; “the conversation...could hardly be called world-shattering”
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