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DEVOURING
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
(often followed by 'for') ardently or excessively desirous
Example:
greedy for fame
Synonyms:
avid; devouring; esurient; greedy
Classified under:
Similar:
desirous; wishful (having or expressing desire for something)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
-ing form of the verb devour
Context examples:
Imagine her dismay, on stealing a glance of timid admiration at the poet whose lines suggested an ethereal being fed on 'spirit, fire, and dew', to behold him devouring his supper with an ardor which flushed his intellectual countenance.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
The waves rose in growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, till in a very few minutes the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and devouring monster.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
My father saw this change with pleasure, and he turned his thoughts towards the best method of eradicating the remains of my melancholy, which every now and then would return by fits, and with a devouring blackness overcast the approaching sunshine.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
But he was foredoomed, and he went down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter editions.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
My employer, ma'am—Mr. Heep—once did me the favour to observe to me, that if I were not in the receipt of the stipendiary emoluments appertaining to my engagement with him, I should probably be a mountebank about the country, swallowing a sword-blade, and eating the devouring element.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own water-jug, baptized the couch afresh, and, by God's aid, succeeded in extinguishing the flames which were devouring it.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I didn't feel sleepy, and I did feel full of devouring anxiety.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
Sometimes, indeed, I felt a wish for happiness and thought with melancholy delight of my beloved cousin or longed, with a devouring maladie du pays, to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that had been so dear to me in early childhood; but my general state of feeling was a torpor in which a prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in nature; and these fits were seldom interrupted but by paroxysms of anguish and despair.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
This precious volume, of which I do not recollect one word, I immediately discovered and immediately applied myself to; and I never visited the house afterwards, but I kneeled on a chair, opened the casket where this gem was enshrined, spread my arms over the desk, and fell to devouring the book afresh.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
