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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
Moira Donegan, New Yorker, 9 June 2026
Even for a voracious diner like me, there’s a lot to keep track of.
—Staff Author, Travel + Leisure, 8 June 2026
The voracious appetite of the world’s largest crude importer — over 10 million barrels a day since the start of the war in Ukraine — has been curbed for now.
—Devika Krishna Kumar, Fortune, 6 June 2026
Still, the elder Sumner maintained important connections, and young Charles, a voracious reader, attended Harvard’s new law school.
—Rob Wolfe, The Atlantic, 5 June 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 17 Jun. 2026.
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voracious
adjective
