- present participle of consume.
consuming
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of consuming
Explanation
If you have a passion for art, and making it is all you can think about or do, your passion for art is consuming. It is intense and almost overwhelming. Picture a fire burning in a fireplace. The fire consumes the logs you have put in it. It completely devours them in order to burn. When something, a passion or a drive, is consuming, it dominates a person's life like that fire, and in a sense, it devours their energy and attention. Your consuming desire to travel might cause you to study abroad for a semester or even move to Europe.
Vocabulary lists containing consuming
"The Scholarship Jacket" by Marta Salinas
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Clap When You Land
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NYTimes Summer Reading Contest Winners' Words
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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.
A disaster management agency official said over the weekend that 12 people had been infected with the disease after consuming dead wildlife in the Munyamadzi River area.
From BBC ● Sep. 14, 2026
“You see a lot of people consuming the minimum, what they need to get by through the week,” said owner Carina Murillo, 31, as she checked out customers on a recent weekday.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 13, 2026
Because semaglutide reduces appetite, the researchers wanted to know whether the apparent anti-aging effects simply came from consuming fewer calories.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 12, 2026
From public offerings of stocks and bonds to bank balance sheets and private-credit funds, the AI build-out is consuming every source of capital it can find.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 10, 2026
To right and left, jostling into frame, are disorderly ranks of trees, which immediately vanish into consuming darkness.
From "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson
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.
