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").
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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").
Examples of voracious in a Sentence
Sonal Dutt, PEOPLE, 3 June 2026
Eric was a year older than me, a good athlete and a voracious reader.
—Peter Hessler, New Yorker, 31 May 2026
The raw footage drew strong reactions from audiences and likely contributed to the doc’s voracious viewership.
—Kevin Dolak, HollywoodReporter, 30 May 2026
Tuesday’s rally was helped by the voracious appetite for memory chips in the artificial intelligence boom, and UBS tripling its price target on Micron, to $1,625.
—Lisa Kailai Han, CNBC, 27 May 2026
See All Example Sentences for voracious
Cite this Entry
“Voracious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voracious. Accessed 10 Jun. 2026.
Copy CitationKids Definition
voracious
adjective
