only 1 use
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Definition
to show submission or fear — sometimes by crawling or lying face down
- But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and...4.1 — Book 4 Chapter 1 — A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet (20% in)
There are no more uses of "grovel" in The Mill on the Floss.
Typical Usage
(best examples)