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.
It requires updating, and in some cases, completely replacing, existing machinery, which can be costly and time consuming.
From BBC ● Jul. 27, 2026
Rather than passively consuming a finished narrative, audiences actively participate in constructing and navigating the environment itself.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 26, 2026
The San Francisco-based startup, a chief rival to OpenAI, said the model tops industry benchmarks for coding and knowledge work while consuming fewer computing resources than earlier versions.
From Barron's ● Jul. 24, 2026
People become infected with the illness by consuming food or water that has been contaminated — the infection is not transmitted from person to person.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2026
Beautiful and well, Yolanda muses, that's what she had wanted with Clive, all things beautiful and well, instead of their obsessive, consuming passion that left her—each time Clive left her—exhausted and distraught.
From "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez
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.
