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devour

verb
/dɪˈvaʊə(ɹ)/UK/dɪˈvaʊɚ/US

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English devouren, from Old French devorer (Modern French dévorer), from Latin dēvorō, from vorō.

  1. derived from dēvorō
  2. derived from devorer
  3. inherited from devouren

Definitions

  1. To eat quickly, greedily, hungrily, or ravenously.

    • Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.

  2. To rapidly destroy, engulf, or lay waste.

    • The fire was devouring the building.
    • If ye refuse[…]ye shall be devoured with the sword.

  3. To take in avidly with the intellect or with one's gaze.

    • She intended to devour the book.
    • My dreams were largely based on the works of Dickens (his Mugby Junction stories), Thackeray (Jeames on the Gauge Question), and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories I kept devouring with gluttonous abandon.
  4. ›+ 2 more definitions

    1. To absorb or engross the mind fully, especially in a destructive manner.

      • After the death of his wife, he was devoured by grief.

    2. Synonym of eat

      Synonym of eat: to be very good at something; to slay.

      • She devoured! She left no crumbs!

The neighborhood

Derived

all-devouring, devourable, devourer, devouringly, devouringness, devourment, interdevour, undevoured

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at devour. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01devour02ravenously03voraciously04voracious05devouring

A definitional loop anchored at devour. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

5 hops · closes at devour

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA