How to Use trawl in a Sentence

trawl

1 of 2 verb
  • The boat trawled far out at sea.
  • He trawled the Internet looking for websites on growing grapes.
  • She was trawling through old letters for information about her family.
  • Yu had a pet cam set up, so was able to trawl through the footage and see exactly what happened.
    — Jack Beresford, MSNBC Newsweek, 16 Oct. 2025
  • The club trawled their records to find details of a credit card used by Salt at the golf club.
    — Dan Sheldon, New York Times, 20 May 2026
  • Cityblock Health will trawl data to spot where care is needed.
    — The Economist, 3 Feb. 2018
  • 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
  • Meanwhile, ad hoc groups of civilians trawl through social media posts and flag them to the police.
    — Loveday Morris, Washington Post, 12 Nov. 2023
  • Investors will trawl his remarks for clues about the central bank’s response to the job numbers.
    — Joe Wallace, WSJ, 6 Feb. 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
  • 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 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
  • Some have also tried to trawl his tweets for clues on Tesla's investment plans for bitcoin.
    — Michelle Toh, CNN, 25 May 2021
  • Scammers trawl social networking sites, forums, and blogs for emails.
    — Kim Komando, USA TODAY, 4 Mar. 2021
  • 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
  • Others have been trawling the same waters for signs of wokeness’ passing.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 22 Feb. 2023
  • The trawling nets of commercial fisherman greedily cull all of the sea life in their path.
    — Suwanna Gauntlett Upjohn, Forbes.com, 31 Aug. 2025
  • Their largest threat is now longline and trawl fishing, especially in the seas off southern Africa.
    — Cecilia Rodriguez, Forbes, 29 Aug. 2021
  • Off the coast of India, a trawling net pulled behind a boat captured a collection of croaker fish.
    — Irene Wright, Miami Herald, 6 Oct. 2025
  • Most people are in this situation at some stage and don’t necessarily have the time to trawl for vintage finds.
    — Gina Tonic, refinery29.com, 24 Dec. 2021
  • Then there's Daily Brief, which trawls your inbox, calendar and tasks overnight and gives you a synthesis with next moves.
    — Dan Fitzpatrick, Forbes.com, 19 May 2026
  • Oz descended from carefree heights of wealth and celebrity to trawl around Pennsylvania and get mocked and abused at every turn.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 18 Aug. 2022
  • 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
  • Many people and euros are required to install, monitor, and repair the nets and to trawl the waters for jellyfish to destroy.
    — Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News, 24 Feb. 2018
  • Fishermen took the hit last week, deciding not to trawl the waters off Italy, with fishing boats along the entire peninsula moored in port.
    — Colleen Barry, ajc, 13 Mar. 2022
  • During the project, Gajić spent almost 200 days at sea with two trawling vessels and checked the catch of other ships while at port, the study said.
    — Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald, 8 Sep. 2025
  • Lacking funds, Rainer began to trawl the city’s local flea markets for old paintings, which were cheaper to buy than fresh canvases.
    — News Desk, Artforum, 23 Dec. 2025

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
  • Or moving trawl gear off the bottom could increase salmon bycatch.
    — Yereth Rosen, Anchorage Daily News, 15 June 2022
  • Currently, shrimp trawl nets pose a serious threat to this species.
    — David Shiffman, The Conversation, 11 July 2023
  • 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
  • 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 majority of what scientists know about this deep-sea creature comes from corpses drudged up in trawl nets.
    — National Geographic, 5 Apr. 2017
  • Lights save salmon - Low cost LED lights can help chinook salmon escape trawl nets.
    — Lynne Curry, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Dec. 2021
  • First half 2023 has proved no exception in Chile’s statue trawl.
    — John Hopewell, Variety, 24 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • Microplastics gathered by a manta trawl in the Sargasso Sea are placed on a map of the area.
    — Shailene Woodley, Time, 4 Sep. 2019
  • 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
  • Beane made trades to maximize his stash, but adding draft picks meant moving back to trawl increasingly shallow waters.
    — Tim Graham, New York Times, 27 Apr. 2026
  • 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 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Some fishermen have questioned why trawl boats, which use large nets to catch a variety of fish, are still being allowed to operate.
    — Joshua A. Bickel, Anchorage Daily News, 6 Sep. 2023
  • 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
  • Commercial vessels trawl in depths of 0–250 meters, the same shallow zone where larvae may be present.
    — Ryan Brennan, Charlotte Observer, 19 Feb. 2026
  • 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
  • But a trawl of messages between Mr Thiam and Mr Bouée yielded nothing.
    — The Economist, 3 Oct. 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
  • Starting in the 1960s, seamounts north of the Hawaiian Islands were heavily fished and scarred with trawl nets.
    — Scientific American, 9 Aug. 2019
  • 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
  • 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 81 million pounds caught each year mostly as bycatch in trawl fisheries could provide more protein to the pet food, aquaculture and livestock feed markets.
    — Laine Welch, Anchorage Daily News, 15 Jan. 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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