sprawling

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of sprawl

comparative more sprawling · superlative most sprawling

1. That sprawls; that spreads in a disorderly fashion.

   a sprawling cityscape

   3 more examples

   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.

   1972, Seymour Topping, “Departure”, in Journey Between Two Chinas, Harper & Row, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 101

   It's close to the sprawling University of Birmingham campus and the ever-growing Queen Elizabeth Hospital site, which also includes a large medical school.

   2021 July 28, Peter Plisner, “The race to the Games has begun”, in RAIL, number 936, page 54

   Donald Trump has decided instead that the NEH’s funds would be better spent on his own dream project: a sprawling sculpture garden with 250 likenesses of people he deems “American heroes.”

   2025 April 15, Gal Beckerman, “Looks Like Mussolini, Quacks Like Mussolini”, in The Atlantic

plural sprawlings

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.

   1838, Colburn's New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, page 176