herbivore
Americannoun
noun
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an animal that feeds on grass and other plants
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informal a liberal, idealistic, or nonmaterialistic person
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An animal that feeds mainly or only on plants. In a food chain, herbivores are primary consumers.
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Compare carnivore detritivore
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of herbivore
Explanation
Given a choice between a sirloin steak and a pile of grass, an herbivore will take the grass every time. If grass isn't on the menu, a salad will do. Herbivores eat plants. The herb in herbivore reminds you that herbivores eat plants rather than other animals. If you know any giraffes, deer, or vegetarians, you might have some herbivore friends. If you have a friend named Herb, let him know he's safe around them. Unless Herb is your favorite houseplant.
Vocabulary lists containing herbivore
Life Science: Ecosystems
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Ecology - Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems - Introductory
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Ecology - Introductory
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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:
Guillermo Deferrari, of Ushuaia's scientific research center, downplayed the landfill theory, explaining that the colilargo is herbivore and lives off seeds and fruit found in forested ecosystems, not in dumps, where the common rat feeds.
From Barron's ● May 12, 2026
Students must do a training stint in each of four main categories — carnivore, herbivore, bird and primate — so they may wind up working with animals they find unpleasant.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 11, 2025
The medium-sized herbivore once roamed the floodplains of what is now the island's south-west coast.
From BBC ● Aug. 22, 2025
The newest — described on Thursday by a team of researchers in the journal PeerJ — is Lokiceratops rangiformis, a five-ton herbivore with spectacular, curving brow horns and huge, bladed spikes on its meter-long frill.
From New York Times ● Jun. 20, 2024
Rahel, standing on the car seat, had grown out of the Plymouth window like the loose, flailing horn of a car-shaped herbivore.
From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy
They’re the base of the aquatic food chain, fed on by herbivores of all shapes and sizes, including shrimp and juvenile fish, which in turn feed organisms higher up the food chain.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 20, 2026
Like that dinosaur, it belonged to the sauropod family of long-necked herbivores.
From BBC ● May 14, 2026
These fossils come from the Morrison Formation* in the United States and were used to reconstruct a detailed food web, showing how plants, herbivores, and carnivores were linked through feeding relationships.
From Science Daily ● Feb. 1, 2026
They often compensate villagers when carnivores kill their livestock or herbivores eat their crops.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026
Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
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.
