voracious
adjective
Did you know?
Voracious is one of several English words that come from the Latin verb vorare, which means "to eat greedily" or "to devour." Vorare is also an ancestor of devour and of the -ivorous words that describe the diets of various creatures. These include carnivorous ("meat-eating"), herbivorous ("plant-eating"), omnivorous ("feeding on both animals and plants"), frugivorous ("fruit-eating"), graminivorous ("feeding on grass"), and piscivorous ("fish-eating").
Did you know?
Veracious or voracious?
Take care to distinguish between the near-homophones veracious and voracious, whose similarities in sound mask utterly different meanings. Veracious (“honest, truthful”), like its cousins veritable, verify, and very, concerns that which is true. Voracious (”having a greedy or insatiable appetite”), on the other hand, describes the urge to consume large quantities of something, often food, books, or ideas. One way to remember the difference is that the one with the E as its second letter means "truE," and the one with the O as its second letter means "ravenOus." Not coincidentally, these adjectives have near-homophonous noun derivatives: veracity ("truthfulness") and voracity ("the quality or state of being voracious").
Synonyms
Examples of voracious in a Sentence
Ashley Miznazi, Miami Herald, 8 Apr. 2024
His voracious curiosity and hunger for new horizons took full flight through it all.
—Steve Hochman, SPIN, 19 Mar. 2024
One fish, two fish, these are new fish The voracious and venomous lionfish is just one of 46 exotic fish species reported in Florida waters by the iNaturalist project Florida's Non-Native Fish.
—Bob Hirshon, Discover Magazine, 2 Mar. 2024
His wealth, which began with a $22,000 family loan, grew into billions of dollars as Chinese people became ever more voracious consumers.
—Bloomberg, Fortune, 27 Feb. 2024
No matter how gruelling her day job, her mental and artistic energies, and indeed the entirety of her voracious mind, are still woefully underemployed.
—Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 22 Mar. 2024
Hungry readers with a voracious appetite will have a chance beginning Thursday to visit some of Central Indiana's coziest reading spaces, and possibly win a prize or two.
—John Tufts, The Indianapolis Star, 21 Mar. 2024
By the 2000s, drug traffickers enjoying political protection helped make Honduras a prime transfer point for cocaine shipments from South America, much of it headed to the United States to satisfy its voracious appetite for the drug.
—Wesley Parnell, New York Times, 4 Mar. 2024
The imbalance between supply and the voracious appetite for AI chips explains why Altman is keenly interested in securing more money to help expand the industry’s manufacturing capacity.
—Michael Liedtke, Fortune, 22 Feb. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'voracious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Voracious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voracious. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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voracious
adjective
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