Photographers Unknown, The Word is Sprawl
Verb: sprawl; third-person singular present “sprawls”; present participle “sprawling”; simple past and past participle “sprawled”.
“There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for the future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk.”
—-Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, 1888
“A shrewd blow, it caught him off balance, and after one ineffectual stagger he sprawled backward and lay for a moment staring up in blank surprise.”
—-Herman Whitaker, Cross Trails: The Story of One Woman in the North Woods, 1914
The Old English word “spreawilian”, meaning ‘to move convulsively’, has cognates, words having the same linguistic derivation as another, in the Scandinavian languages, such as the Norwegian “sprala”, the Danish “spraelle”, and the North Frisian “spraweli”. These words probably ultimately came from the Proto-Indo-European root “sper-“, meaning ‘to strew’. Usage as a verb meaning ‘to spread out’ is noted as early as 1300 AD. Usage meaning ‘to spread or stretch in a careless manner’ is attested to be from 1745 AD.