gormandize
Americanverb (used with or without object)
noun
verb
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of gormandize
1540–50; < French gourmandise (noun), equivalent to Middle French gourmand gourmand + -ise noun suffix later taken as v. suffix -ize
Explanation
To gormandize is to eat lots and lots of really tasty food. If your idea of a perfect night out is an enormous meal at a fancy restaurant, then you love to gormandize. Although gormandize comes from the Middle French word gourmand, it's not related to the similar-looking gourmet. While a gourmet is someone who enjoys fine food, a person who tends to gormandize also loves delicious fare, but puts the emphasis on quantity. So a few bites of sashimi or foie gras might make you a gourmet, but eating them until you feel sick is gormandizing.
Vocabulary lists containing gormandize
The Merchant of Venice
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Bleak House
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Henry IV, Part 2
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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:
Hawaiian oranges were delicious, although "I seldom eat more than 10 or 15 at a sitting, however, because I despise to see anybody gormandize."
From Time Magazine Archive
Its walls are thin and yielding, and may become unnaturally distended, as in the case of those who subsist on a bulky, innutritious diet, and of those who habitually gormandize.
From A Treatise on Physiology and Hygiene For Educational Institutions and General Readers by Joseph Chrisman Hutchison
Singers also are proverbially prone to gormandize; and though the Bird of Paradise unfortunately possessed the smallest mouth in all Singingland, it is astonishing how she pecked!
From Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 4 by Hamilton Wright Mabie
V. eat, feed, fare, devour, swallow, take; gulp, bolt, snap; fall to; despatch, dispatch; discuss; take down, get down, gulp down; lay in, tuck in*; lick, pick, peck; gormandize &c.
From Roget's Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget
Their power to gormandize seems unlimited, and the number of insects they can swallow without protest is almost incredible.
From The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young by Margaret Warner Morley
The signoras and signorinas fell upon them and gormandized; but the signors eyed them with reasonable suspicion.
From The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade
They jess sot thar, an' gormandized on waffles an' batter-cakes, an' didn't call no names.
From Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches by Joel Chandler Harris
At that time he preferred serving food to being a viand for those who gormandized oddities.
From An Apostate: Nawin of Thais by Steven (Steven David Justin) Sills
The pieces were of a generous size, and after all three had gormandized themselves until, absolutely, they could contain no more, each had some left.
From Adrift in the Wilds or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys by Edward Sylvester Ellis
He never drank to excess, nor gormandized, nor gambled, nor even smoked, nor in any other way wasted the vitality needed for a long and tough grapple with adverse fortune.
From Famous Americans of Recent Times by James Parton
The author of this hedonistic, gormandizing prayer is a Christian clergyman of serene faith.
From Time Magazine Archive
He was one of countless individuals marked for a tidbit to glut the gormandizing of a trust.
From Making People Happy by Harrison Fisher
Her voice held all the glee of a gormandizing child.
From Revelations of a Wife The Story of a Honeymoon by Adele Garrison
He loved not the Captain, because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings."
From Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2) by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
He wore away our forks and spoons With hard, incessant gormandizing; The Baker's, and, for some blue moons, The Milkman's bill were quite surprising.
From Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, October 1, 1892 by Various
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.
