- 1（都市、建築物）雜亂蔓延的、無秩序擴張的。urban sprawl＝都市蔓延；用在小說電影時是「篇幅龐大、人物眾多」，褒貶要看上下文
Spreading out over a wide area with no clear shape or plan, so it looks messy or . It is used most for cities and buildings — a sprawling city that keeps eating the fields around it, a sprawling housing estate, a sprawling old hospital that grew one wing at a time. The feeling is usually negative: too big, badly planned, hard to get around. But not always — 'a sprawling country house' can sound grand and comfortable, and English speakers also use it for books and films ('a sprawling novel' — long, with many characters, hard to hold in your head), sometimes as praise for its scale, sometimes as a complaint that it lost control. Read it from the sentence around it. The matching noun is 'urban sprawl', the endless low spread of a city .
From the word’s history
From sprawl, from Old English spreawlian 'move convulsively'.
sprawl 加 -ing；源自古英文 spreawlian「抽動、亂動」。
組成From the verb 'sprawl' (to spread out loosely and untidily) + -ing, used here as a description of something that does this.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
sprawlingadj
- 1
That sprawls; that spreads in a disorderly fashion.
- a sprawling cityscape
- We looked over Hoihow, a dirty sprawling city of 250,000 people, many of them living in old two-story buildings made of mud and white plaster, across the narrow Hainan Strait to the Liuchow Peninsula on the mainland.
sprawlingnoun
- 1
The act of one who sprawls.
- Having feasted our souls with this sublime spectacle, we ministered to the wants of the body by a plentiful breakfast, and about noon we commenced the descent, rendered ludicrous enough by various tumblings and sprawlings on the part of the more inexpert mountaineers.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。