gobble
1 Americanverb (used without object)
noun
-
gobbles
plural
noun
interjection
verb
verb
-
to eat or swallow (food) hastily and in large mouthfuls
-
informal to snatch
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of gobble1
1595–1605; probably imitative; see gob 1, -le
Origin of gobble2
First recorded in 1670–80; variant of gabble
Explanation
To gobble is to eat quickly — really quickly. When you gobble your dinner, you hardly even chew your food. You’ve probably been told that gobbling your food is impolite. However, maybe you can get away with it if you impress your dining companions with some interesting facts about this word’s history. Gobble comes from an Old French word meaning “a mouthful” or “a lump.” It’s related to gob, a slang term for “mouth” in the UK.
Vocabulary lists containing gobble
"When Cultures Meet"
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Crenshaw
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The Circuit
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Balds — fish lovers themselves — can consume hooks and sinkers when they gobble down their prey, potentially poisoning them, Koh said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 20, 2026
Huge exporters—including the U.S.—are vying to gobble up market share in a world where the prospect for demand growth was already uncertain before a once-in-a-generation energy shock.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 29, 2026
Every year, healthcare expenses gobble up a growing portion of Social Security benefits.
From Barron's ● Jan. 29, 2026
Jackrabbits or other critters that need the water encased in the plant often gobble them up.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 21, 2025
We gobble up our sandwiches and chug down our milk while Mami stands over us trying to get us to slow down.
From "Lucky Broken Girl" by Ruth Behar
The answer, for that sample, was: mostly Desmodesmus, a green algae that gobbles up phosphorus and nitrogen.
From Slate ● Jun. 27, 2026
Lately, she’s making a feast of roles that all remind me of that old sitcom episode in which Lucille Ball gobbles chocolates on a conveyor belt.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 21, 2026
Airlines are “the worst sort of business”—one that grows quickly and gobbles up cash while producing little or no profit, he wrote at the time.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 19, 2026
Meanwhile, the consumer-electronics world faces an acute memory-chip shortage, as AI-infrastructure demand gobbles up semiconductor supplies and thus threatens to drive up the price of things like smartphones and laptops.
From MarketWatch ● Apr. 25, 2026
Nicola snatches the chocolate cake and gobbles it.
From "The Unfinished Angel" by Sharon Creech
I wrote a daily newsletter about energy policy at the time, and, in my efforts to be at the forefront of the news, I gobbled up those nuggets as well.
From Slate ● Jul. 27, 2026
On the remote east side of Mono Lake, he said the animals gobbled down grass, roots and all, depriving certain birds of the worms that live in the vegetation — their sustenance.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2026
A never-ending stream of data about us being gobbled up by thousands of companies.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 23, 2026
Since the books became an international phenomenon, we’ve lined up for the resulting movies, gobbled up licensed merchandise, and bought tickets to its hit play and theme parks.
From Salon ● Apr. 2, 2026
After he retired, the machine gobbled up the one independent office left.
From "Go Set a Watchman: A Novel" by Harper Lee
To meet those demands, Goldman is gobbling up active-ETF managers, having bought Innovator Capital Management for some $2 billion earlier this year.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 12, 2026
But now AI servers are gobbling up rapidly increasing volumes of those chips, so even a company as rich and powerful as Apple is struggling to secure supply.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 17, 2026
But he learned how to make pizza, and how much customers loved gobbling it up, while working at different gas station mini-marts around rural Nevada.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 14, 2026
The marauding monkeys brazenly snatch ice cream, cakes and crisps from unwitting tourists in addition to gobbling abandoned leftovers from bins or food directly offered to them.
From Barron's ● May 22, 2026
I watch the rat greedily gobbling down my leftovers and try to see what makes Nate so special.
From "Dragons in a Bag" by Zetta Elliott
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
