edacious
adjective
Pronunciation
ih-DAY-shus
Definition
1 : having a huge appetite : ravenous
2 : excessively eager : insatiable
Examples
Living with three edacious teenagers, Marilyn and Roger were dismayed by how much they had to spend on groceries week after week.
"... Stone's narrative prowess had been such as to infect me ... with his Weltschmerz. In fairness, Stone alone was not to blame. For too many years my edacious reading habits had been leading me into one unappealing corner after another...." — Tom Robbins, Harper's, September 2004
Did You Know?
Tempus edax rerum. That wise Latin line by the Roman poet Ovid translates as "Time, the devourer of all things." Ovid's correlation between rapaciousness and time is appropriate to a discussion of edacious. That English word is a descendant of Latin edax, which is a derivative of the verb edere, meaning "to eat." In its earliest known English uses, edacious meant "of or relating to eating." It later came to be used generally as a synonym of voracious, and it has often been used specifically in contexts referring to time. That's how Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle used it when he referred to events "swallowed in the depths of edacious Time."
Word Quiz
What is the meaning of esurient, an adjective that can be traced back to Latin edere, meaning "to eat"?
Merriam-Webster
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