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
The sprawling, power-hungry sites, used to store critical IT infrastructure like servers, are being built worldwide by companies and countries as AI applications gobble ever greater computing power.
From Barron's ● Jun. 30, 2026
Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that FIFA, in its desire to gobble every dollar, has unlocked a new luxury market.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 29, 2026
Grant said he tried to make the deal work, but ultimately determined the tax would gobble up too much of the project’s future value.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 20, 2026
Other kids would gobble the food they had brought at little recess and then were hungry later—but not Celeste.
From "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers
Micron’s profits have surged as Big Tech’s AI expansion gobbles up the supply of available memory chips.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 23, 2026
The answer, for that sample, was: mostly Desmodesmus, a green algae that gobbles up phosphorus and nitrogen.
From Slate ● Jun. 27, 2026
The idea is to ensure XTX can keep training its models cheaply even as the AI boom gobbles up ever more data-center capacity worldwide.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 23, 2026
Market research firms like IDC and Counterpoint Research have indicated that the weakness is in the Android market, while Apple gobbles up market share amid a memory chip shortage.
From Barron's ● Apr. 16, 2026
The cassor sniffs it, bites it, and gobbles it down, its neck rippling in long waves as it swallows.
From "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness
All that promise started to wither around 2015, as social media giants gobbled up more and more of the profits that kept earlier hangouts afloat.
From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2026
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
“Anything that is available in the United States is gobbled up immediately,” Murphy said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 14, 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
We gobbled them down and went to find seats in the bleachers.
From "The Lions of Little Rock" by Kristin Levine
His previous feature, 2016’s love-it-or-hate-it loony toon “The Neon Demon,” was a modeling industry semi-satire that featured beauties quite literally gobbling up their ingenue competition.
From Salon ● Aug. 17, 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
Any other time Chester would have been gobbling up the leaf.
From "The Cricket in Times Square" by George Selden
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.
