voracious

UK/vɔːˈɹeɪ.ʃəs/US/vɔːˈɹeɪ.ʃəs/

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,776 of 15,258neutral

Voracious means eating or consuming a great deal, and greedily. Never quite full.

The literal sense belongs to appetite, so a voracious appetite is enormous. The figurative sense is much commoner and warmer, since a voracious reader gets through books the way somebody hungry gets through food, and it is a compliment. It works for curiosity and for demand too. The word comes from the same Latin root as devour. Its close relatives are ravenous, which is about hunger only, and insatiable, which is stronger still.

Definitions of voracious

1adjectivevoraciousConsuming large quantities eagerly.C1
“He has a voracious appetite for detective novels.”

Where it comes from

From vorāx + -acious.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sharper Adjectives, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 39 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

voracious in the wild

The Maguindanaon and the Banuwaen use it in the rice paddies to guard against voracious birds, using the sound it produces to scare them away.
Kagul
The Stymphalian birds are a group of voracious birds in Greek mythology.
Stymphalian birds
The voracious shrew (Crocidura vorax) is a common and widespread species of shrew native to China, India, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Voracious shrew
Gehyra vorax, also known as the voracious four-clawed gecko or voracious dtella, is a gecko native to Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga.
Gehyra vorax

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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