diff --git a/docs/topics/commands.rst b/docs/topics/commands.rst
index 2b41e254f..87f6f6aa4 100644
--- a/docs/topics/commands.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/commands.rst
@@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ some usage help and the available commands::
       scrapy <command> [options] [args]
 
     Available commands:
-      crawl         Start crawling a spider or URL
+      crawl         Run a spider
       fetch         Fetch a URL using the Scrapy downloader
     [...]
 
diff --git a/scrapy/commands/crawl.py b/scrapy/commands/crawl.py
index cafbac6f8..f0cd06a55 100644
--- a/scrapy/commands/crawl.py
+++ b/scrapy/commands/crawl.py
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ class Command(ScrapyCommand):
         return "[options] <spider>"
 
     def short_desc(self):
-        return "Start crawling from a spider"
+        return "Run a spider"
 
     def add_options(self, parser):
         ScrapyCommand.add_options(self, parser)