snail 1 of 2

snail

2 of 2

verb

as in to drag
to move slowly the highway construction work created a bottleneck that had cars snailing for the next five miles

Synonyms & Similar Words

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of snail
Noun
How her mind moved from two swans to a snail shell is beauty. Victoria Chang, The New York Review of Books, 2 Oct. 2025 No snail’s pace here For those who enjoy a more uptempo pace, get ready. Roderick Boone, Charlotte Observer, 29 Sep. 2025
Verb
Could snail slime and salmon sperm be the next big things in skincare? Leslie Baumann, Miami Herald, 26 Jan. 2024 What can snail mucin do for your skin? Lacey Muinos, Health, 13 Feb. 2023 See All Example Sentences for snail
Recent Examples of Synonyms for snail
Noun
  • California has 42 official state symbols after Governor Newsom signed three bills to create new symbols in 2024, including the Dungeness crab as the state crustacean, the banana slug as the state slug, and the black abalone as the state seashell.
    Martha McHardy, MSNBC Newsweek, 10 Oct. 2025
  • Some swimming snails have lost their protective shells (more like swimming slugs), while others retain them.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 25 Sep. 2025
Verb
  • These robots grow from their tip by turning their skin inside out, a mechanism that enables them to advance without dragging against their surroundings.
    Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 16 Oct. 2025
  • But the movie’s soft-hearted underbelly fails to support that reading, and by the time the story finally arrives at its final moments, the unsparing cynicism that supplied its initial lift has been dragged back down to Earth by the weight of bland truisms.
    David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 15 Oct. 2025
Noun
  • Although the crawlers are more common in the western half of the state, they can be found in every county in Tennessee with the possible exception of a few extreme eastern counties.
    Diana Leyva, Nashville Tennessean, 2 Oct. 2025
  • The company was supposed to have blocked crawlers from Google harvesting Claude chats, but hundreds of conversations were found with some simple searches.
    Thomas Brewster, Forbes.com, 16 Sep. 2025
Verb
  • Instead of nurturing bold concepts through this early stage, investors are now implicitly asking that entrepreneurs crawl through it alone.
    Roman Axelrod, Fortune, 8 Oct. 2025
  • And there's these little worms crawling around.
    Steve Bender, Southern Living, 8 Oct. 2025
Noun
  • Retired or not, the world’s greatest quarterback does not have the luxury to indulge in sequential action—one thing at a time is for slowpokes and losers.
    Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 25 Jan. 2025
  • One group of 15 female rats, brighter in color than the rest, kept zooming past the others to make it into the houses first, making the rest of their furry colleagues look like slowpokes.
    Laura Bradley, Vulture, 17 Jan. 2025
Verb
  • The shadow of a mad scientist is always creeping over his shoulder, tapping on it, reminding him to be clever.
    Troy Renck, Denver Post, 13 Oct. 2025
  • After battling late summer heat, the Greater Cincinnati region is finally starting to cool down with fall temperatures slowly creeping in.
    Kaycee Sloan, Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 Oct. 2025
Verb
  • My neighbors started poking their heads in the front door, too.
    Melissa Willets, Parents, 14 Oct. 2025
  • This bra has wide straps, side-smoothing panels, and an allover stretchy fit — sans wires poking you in the ribcage.
    Jeaneen Russell, PEOPLE, 14 Oct. 2025
Noun
  • Economies that embed decarbonization into their growth models are becoming magnets for investment; laggards are already seeing their cost of capital rise.
    Felicia Jackson, Forbes.com, 3 Oct. 2025
  • The study finds the performance gap between AI leaders and laggards is widening fast, primarily driven by the rise of agentic AI.
    Sheryl Estrada, Fortune, 3 Oct. 2025

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Cite this Entry

“Snail.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/snail. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.

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