Choose the Right Synonym for voracious

voracious, gluttonous, ravenous, rapacious mean excessively greedy. voracious applies especially to habitual gorging with food or drink. teenagers are often voracious eaters gluttonous applies to one who delights in eating or acquiring things especially beyond the point of necessity or satiety. an admiral who was gluttonous for glory ravenous implies excessive hunger and suggests violent or grasping methods of dealing with food or with whatever satisfies an appetite. a nation with a ravenous lust for territorial expansion rapacious often suggests excessive and utterly selfish acquisitiveness or avarice. rapacious developers indifferent to environmental concerns

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").

Did You Know?

Voracious is one of several English words that derive 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, which describe the diets of various animals. 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").

Examples of voracious in a Sentence

He has a voracious appetite. it seemed like the voracious kitten was eating her weight in food every day

Recent Examples on the Web The deal, announced Wednesday, underscores the voracious appetite for content by companies that own streaming services. — Meg James, Los Angeles Times, 21 Apr. 2021 Wellcome was a voracious collector of scientific and archaeological artifacts and amassed more than a million objects during his lifetime. — Los Angeles Times, 3 May 2021 Earns bonus points as a Dallas native and voracious newspaper reader. — Kevin Sherrington, Dallas News, 27 Apr. 2021 All the while, though, Wylie has remained focused on her craft, unfazed by the now-voracious attention. — New York Times, 22 Apr. 2021 The most voracious fire could not have sought a more potent combination! — Gary Kamiya, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 Apr. 2021 While there has been a recent selloff in shares of technology firms and SPACs, many of the hardest hit among them surged Tuesday in a sign that the appetite for risk that is fueling new issues remains voracious. — Maureen Farrell, WSJ, 10 Mar. 2021 Will my reading aloud turn my boy into a voracious reader who will want to sit in a corner with a book instead of playing ball outside? — Washington Post, 21 Apr. 2021 His voracious appetite, once a thing of family lore, had vanished. — Rachel Zarrow, Bon Appétit, 14 Apr. 2021

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'voracious.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.