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").
Examples of voracious in a Sentence
David Lyman, Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 Oct. 2025
The larvae are voracious and consume many aphids and scale crawlers during this stage of development, MSU said.
—Jalen Williams, Freep.com, 27 Oct. 2025
Burns, a voracious reader of history from a young age, received an 8mm film camera as a gift on his 17th birthday.
—Carlo Versano, MSNBC Newsweek, 22 Oct. 2025
The intent is to reduce the population of the non-native mute swan, a large, voracious and territorial bird that competes for resources with native waterfowl and other wetland species.
—Bay Area News Group, Mercury News, 22 Oct. 2025
See All Example Sentences for voracious
Cite this Entry
“Voracious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voracious. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
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voracious
adjective
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