variants
or grovelling
as in fawning
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Dissimilar Words
variants
or grovelling
1
2
as in crawling
to move slowly with the body close to the ground
because of their anatomy, bats can only grovel while moving along the ground
Synonyms & Similar Words
Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of groveling
Matthias Matthijs, Foreign Affairs, 12 Dec. 2025
Continue reading … POINTING FINGERS – Former vice president accuses newspaper owners of 'groveling' to Trump in new book.
—FOXNews.com, 24 Sep. 2025
Verb
Rather than wait it out until January 2029, when magical thinking assumes the current transatlantic nightmare will come to an end, the EU needs to stop groveling and build greater sovereignty.
—Recent Examples of Synonyms for groveling
Verb
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In it, her fellow students can be seen gasping, covering their faces and cringing.—
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Encouraged to see Jones sorta respond, Mackie kept babbling on and on and on about his dad, unaware that everyone else in the room was cringing.—
Verb
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Now, Letts has brought Coon back to Broadway with the Main Stem debut of his 1996 play Bug, a skin-crawling portrayal of people on the fringes.—
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Here, there's a skin-crawling effect to watching the story unfold onstage.—
Adjective
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Carol, a reclusive and disgruntled bestselling romantasy author, exhorts her reticent audience of five immune English speakers to reclaim human agency against the milquetoast, obsequious blob and join her in a quest to reverse the happiness apocalypse.—
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Might the show — with its army of all-knowing, obsequious entities consuming humanity — be a metaphor for the dangers of artificial intelligence?—
Verb
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In this Tudor renovation, designer Barrie Benson combined 10 different textiles and prints in a single, orderly viewpoint without flinching.—
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Human reflexes naturally protect the eyes; blinking, tearing, and flinching are some of the fastest human reflexes.—
Verb
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Grow as a creeping vine or along a trellis.—
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What’s that warmth creeping over you?—
Adjective
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After all, the deal — for a long-forsaken project, an action-comedy franchise starring two aging stars — underscores the servile fealty of new Paramount owners Larry and David Ellison amid their recent maneuvering to take control of TikTok and Warner Bros. Discovery (the latter seemingly futile).—
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Earlier this year, my colleague and bud Kelefa Sanneh suggested that music critics, as a lot, have gone soft—becoming submissive, overly agreeable, and, in some cases, nearly servile.—
Verb
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Hydroplaning is the term for when a vehicle begins sliding uncontrollably on wet roads.—
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Or are the Seminoles at risk of sliding into irrelevance if trips to the Gator Bowl become acceptable?—
Adjective
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Researchers and even users can alter these personas through technical tweaks, as many ChatGPT users found out earlier this year when the OpenAI service fluctuated between personalities that were either gushing and sycophantic or emotionally distant.—
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In our first exchanges, my noncommittal 10-word texts prompted hundreds of words in response, much of them sycophantic.—
Cite this Entry
“Groveling.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/groveling. Accessed 12 Jan. 2026.
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