What is the difference between trolling and trawling

A bluefin tuna is not something that is caught everyday in Bermuda, even though they have always been known to transit local waters at various times. And anyone following the television programme Wicked Tuna knows that a really large one makes everything better. So, a great catch and plenty of exposure in the media; all good but for one thing and one thing only and that is this.

Both have different origins and although each word has several meanings as well as acting as both nouns and verbs, both can refer to fishing. But they refer to very different types of fishing. Trawling usually refers to some form of industrial fishing.

Basically, it is a big net that is dragged behind a boat. There are bottom trawlers that drag the net along the bottom catching everything from fish to scallops and beyond. In places like the Gulf of Mexico they fish this way for shrimp.

The unfortunate thing is that a lot of other marine life also gets captured and are then thrown overboard or otherwise discarded as useless, often affecting the marine environment adversely. Then there are mid-water trawls that fish quite deep but do not stir up the bottom. This particular type of commercial fishing has uncovered populations of fish that were hitherto unknown. The orange roughy is a good example. Finding its way into supermarkets and fish shops in the Eighties, consumers have the deep trawl commercial fishery to thank for this species.

There are also trawl nets that fish waters nearer the surface and are used to catch a wide variety of fish species. Overall, though, the point is that rod and reel fishing as practised here and elsewhere is not, cannot and never has been used for trawling.

Although rods and reels can be used for cast fishing, still fishing, bottom fishing and even kite fishing, one of the more popular uses is for trolling. Simply defined, it is the practice of dragging a rigged bait or artificial lure behind a boat, making use of the boat as a fish-attracting device, resulting from the water displaced and the sounds made.

There's the troll of Norwegian folklore "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" , who lives under a bridge and eats up anyone who tries to cross it. A BBC production of the story in imagined him as a "tragic, cruelly maligned victim," The Daily Telegraph reported.

Go figure. Today a troll is someone who deliberately sends a rude or annoying message to a discussion group on the Internet. Trolls are also those who acquire patents, copyrights, and trademarks and don't produce anything but rather make their money by suing others for infringement.

Troll as a verb, which comes from French, has a number of meanings, generally rooted in the idea of rolling around, moving about in search of whatever turns up.

There's a musical sense of troll : to sing the parts of a piece of music such as a round, the idea being that the music rolls through various sections of the choir. Troll versus trawl pops up on Chris Waigl 's Eggcorn Database. Eggcorns are similar to but distinct from malapropisms. Once described as a "slip of the ear," an eggcorn is the written expression of a plausible mishearing of a standard term.

It gets misheard, though, as "for all intensive purposes," and sometimes appears that way in print. That's an eggcorn. So is "manner from heaven," which makes sense if you've heard the phrase but not seen it written — especially if you live in a place where final r's are not pronounced. Eggcorn itself is an eggcorn. To quote from the database: "Erroneous as it may be, the substitution [for acorn ] involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn.

So if you don't know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense. Two fishing terms with very similar pronunciations, both used metaphorically, make for a lot of eggcorn potential. A forum on the Eggcorn Database includes this on trolling versus trawling: "To 'troll' through an archive would mean to glide through it and see what catches your interest, while to 'trawl' it would mean to read everything you come across.

I think 'troll' makes more sense with the intended meaning. That said, I think you would be understood best if you said something like "I had to trawl each script to find the called files. Edit: As Kristina pointed out in a comment to this answer, "to comb through" is often used to specify checking something carefully.

I believe that 'trawling through', as in searching through and this can be online or in the 'real' world' is the more common term. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 8 years, 3 months ago. Active 6 years, 7 months ago. Viewed 11k times. A guide I'm reading has the following phrase, which I suspect is used incorrectly: "without trolling through each script to find all the files they call" Thanks.

Improve this question. Now, I'd associate troll with walking, as in Tra, la! Mr 'Orn. How bona to vada your dolly old eek. Troll in! Add a comment.