How to Use trawl in a Sentence

trawl

1 of 2 verb
Definition of trawlnext
  • He trawled the Internet looking for websites on growing grapes.
  • She was trawling through old letters for information about her family.
  • But in the ‘90s, the Arnolds had to trawl as far as 30 miles offshore to find fish.
    — Isabella Breda, Anchorage Daily News, 7 Nov. 2022
  • And in the city of Santa Barbara, they are still used by the police to trawl those mean streets.
    — John Pearley Huffman, Car and Driver, 6 Sep. 2020
  • The girl who writhed in the web of her bedsheets, walked the streets trawling for impressions.
    — Hannah Gold, Harper's Magazine, 11 Oct. 2022
  • One of the ships trawled with two 19-foot-wide devices, sampling for very large objects.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 23 Mar. 2018
  • The lagoon into which, mere days ago, Alison watched the blond boy hit golf balls is trawled to no avail.
    — Seija Rankin, EW.com, 22 Jan. 2020
  • Investors will trawl his remarks for clues about the central bank’s response to the job numbers.
    — Joe Wallace, WSJ, 6 Feb. 2023
  • Cityblock Health will trawl data to spot where care is needed.
    — The Economist, 3 Feb. 2018
  • Meanwhile, ad hoc groups of civilians trawl through social media posts and flag them to the police.
    — Loveday Morris, Washington Post, 12 Nov. 2023
  • Lake Erie trawl net surveys of the spring walleye spawning season.
    — cleveland, 16 Sep. 2021
  • Weighted nets are trawled along the ocean floor, collecting hundreds of thousands of fish at once.
    — Ali Francis, Bon Appétit, 15 Mar. 2023
  • To get a sense of what’s piling up in surface slicks, Gove and his colleagues trawled large nets through the surface water in slicks off the coast of Hawai’i Island.
    — Cathleen O'Grady, Ars Technica, 14 Nov. 2019
  • Xavier has been trawling for shrimp and fish off India’s southwestern coast for more than three decades, his whole adult life.
    — National Geographic, 23 May 2018
  • Back in May, a group of Dutch fishermen trawling the North Sea noticed that a baby porpoise had been caught up in one of their nets.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 16 June 2017
  • Back in May, a group of Dutch fishermen trawling the North Sea noticed that a baby porpoise had been caught up in one of their nets.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 15 June 2017
  • The dress is a prized possession for anyone who has been able to unearth one eBay or by trawling vintage shops.
    — Brooke Bobb, Vogue, 14 Dec. 2018
  • Some have also tried to trawl his tweets for clues on Tesla's investment plans for bitcoin.
    — Michelle Toh, CNN, 25 May 2021
  • Alaska pollock, the nation’s largest food fishery, opens to trawl fishing on Jan. 20.
    — Laine Welch | Fish Factor, Anchorage Daily News, 12 Jan. 2022
  • Their largest threat is now longline and trawl fishing, especially in the seas off southern Africa.
    — Cecilia Rodriguez, Forbes, 29 Aug. 2021
  • And shrimp boats trawling in U.S. waters since 1987 have been required to equip their nets with escape hatches for sea turtles.
    — Washington Post, 13 July 2019
  • Someone has had to trawl through every player to appear for the club in the last 78 years to answer critics who say United buys success.
    — Peter Berlin, SI.com, 7 May 2017
  • Prostitutes openly trawled downtown, as well as Hawthorne Boulevard and Sandy Boulevard on the east side.
    — Douglas Perry, OregonLive.com, 21 June 2017
  • Each time the whale shark came up to the photic zone to trawl for plankton, the bob would rise to the surface and (with luck) be detected by one of a network of orbiting satellites.
    — Ryan P. Smith, Smithsonian, 8 May 2018
  • Those fishing grounds are now managed by Brussels and packed with European vessels that trawl with nets and sometimes scrape the seabed.
    — Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2016
  • The Chinese fishers are helping feed the country’s growing appetite for seafood by trawling the South China Sea.
    — New York Times, 31 Mar. 2020
  • Others have been trawling the same waters for signs of wokeness’ passing.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 22 Feb. 2023
  • Scenes of the most desperate people trawling through bins for food — once unheard-of — shocked the majority of Greeks who struggled to make ends meet.
    — Niki Kitsantonis, New York Times, 24 June 2023
  • The company’s crawlers, which trawl the web and collect information about pages, have indexed more than six billion web pages.
    — Boone Ashworth, WIRED, 26 Nov. 2023
  • Fishery surveys often involve a crewed ship that features a sonar for estimating biomass and people trawling for fish, De Robertis explained.
    — Alka Tripathy-Lang, Ars Technica, 21 June 2023
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trawl

2 of 2 noun
  • For fishing, boats tow trawl nets along the sea floor, which can damage the wrecks.
    — Darren Incorvaia, Discover Magazine, 5 Oct. 2022
  • There is no denying that the trawl sector bears the brunt of the bycatch burden.
    — Laine Welch | Fish Factor, Anchorage Daily News, 14 Mar. 2022
  • The winch sucks in the wires like spaghetti, until the trawl doors clang loudly into the Launch Out’s hull.
    — Matthew Bremner, Slate Magazine, 24 July 2017
  • The bottom trawl bycatch take of over 4 million pounds comes off the top of all other users.
    — Laine Welch | Fish Factor, Anchorage Daily News, 18 Oct. 2021
  • Starting in the 1960s, seamounts north of the Hawaiian Islands were heavily fished and scarred with trawl nets.
    — Scientific American, 9 Aug. 2019
  • Lights save salmon - Low cost LED lights can help chinook salmon escape trawl nets.
    — Lynne Curry, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Dec. 2021
  • In Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, trawl nets contributed to 60.4 % of all shark landings.
    — Bhanu Sridharan, Quartz India, 25 Nov. 2019
  • So far, all the Nationals have been able to do to bolster that group is trawl the depths of the league and see if anything useful can be pulled from the dregs.
    — Jon Tayler, SI.com, 30 June 2017
  • Microplastics gathered by a manta trawl in the Sargasso Sea are placed on a map of the area.
    — Shailene Woodley, Time, 4 Sep. 2019
  • Finally, a common outcry has been against the trawl fleet, which does take crab as bycatch in the Bering Sea.
    — Elizabeth Earl For Alaska Journal Of Commerce, Anchorage Daily News, 16 June 2022
  • Aboard a wooden fishing trawler of about 65 feet, Fèlix Boquera helps ready the trawl net for the day’s work—the pursuit of the gamba roja, red shrimp.
    — Wendy Mitman Clarke, Smithsonian, 5 July 2018
  • First half 2023 has proved no exception in Chile’s statue trawl.
    — John Hopewell, Variety, 24 Aug. 2023
  • Or moving trawl gear off the bottom could increase salmon bycatch.
    — Yereth Rosen, Anchorage Daily News, 15 June 2022
  • To survey ocean life, researchers typically drag trawl nets or haul up traps and log what turns up in them.
    — Amanda Paulson, The Christian Science Monitor, 15 Aug. 2019
  • There are so many references that the show feels as if it was written by dragging a fishing trawl through a library.
    — New York Times, 24 May 2018
  • The other survey vessel followed the same track as Damm’s trawl, but equipment that could have snagged his gear wasn’t deployed.
    — Will Sennott, ProPublica, 18 Apr. 2023
  • During the trawl, the researchers studied 13 kitefin sharks, 7 blackbelly lantern sharks, and 4 southern lantern sharks, which were kept alive in a dark cold room on-board.
    — Melissa Cristina Márquez, Forbes, 3 Mar. 2021
  • The filing suggests that dozens of phones that were in airplane mode during the riot, or otherwise out of cell service, were caught up in the trawl.
    — WIRED, 28 Nov. 2022
  • The majority of what scientists know about this deep-sea creature comes from corpses drudged up in trawl nets.
    — National Geographic, 5 Apr. 2017
  • But a trawl of messages between Mr Thiam and Mr Bouée yielded nothing.
    — The Economist, 3 Oct. 2019
  • The endangered whale sharks were trapped in what appeared to be a midsized trawl net, a type of net typically used to catch large groups of fish or shrimp.
    — Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic, 17 Aug. 2017
  • The endangered whale sharks were trapped in what appeared to be a midsized trawl net, a type of net typically used to catch large groups of fish or shrimp.
    — Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic, 17 Aug. 2017
  • To the right, a net-casting spider (Deinopis) holds a silken trawl between her claws, ready to drop it when her quarry wanders underneath.
    — Lindzi Wessel, Discover Magazine, 6 Nov. 2018
  • These include bottom trawl nets, which collect species such as scallops and flounder from the sea floor, and the long lines of hooks used to catch cod, tuna, and other large fish.
    — Byerik Stokstad, science.org, 12 Oct. 2022
  • The federal council vote, which happened April 9, is part of a broader effort to turn around the fortunes of the Northwest bottom trawl fleet.
    — Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times, 16 Apr. 2018
  • And as of last week, the agency's annual bottom trawl survey had yet to begin and was in jeopardy of being cancelled, too.
    — Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 13 Sep. 2020
  • Normally, the biggest driver would be data from the annual summer trawl surveys that have tracked the stocks for decades.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 15 Sep. 2020
  • The development of otter trawls and the expansion of inshore and offshore commercial shrimping through most of the 1900s added to the drain on sea turtles.
    — Shannon Tompkins, Houston Chronicle, 13 Jan. 2018
  • Off the side of the Esperanza, the manta trawl lazily gobbles up water samples from the ocean's surface that are filtered through its long mesh tail.
    — Arwa Damon, CNN, 19 Aug. 2019
  • Net mesh size and shape have been changed to allow smaller shrimp to escape the trawl, and the fishery is closed entirely for two months when juveniles move into the fishing grounds.
    — Wendy Mitman Clarke, Smithsonian, 5 July 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'trawl.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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