adjective
-
famished; starving
-
rapacious; voracious
Usage
What does ravenous mean? Ravenous means extremely hungry, as in After being unable to eat solid foods for a week, Isaac was now ravenous.Ravenous in this sense is often used figuratively. You might be hungry but not literally starving and still describe yourself as ravenous.Ravenous also means extremely greedy or predatory. It’s especially used to describe predatory animals, but it’s also used to describe people. Ravenous people may be greedy for riches, fame, or something else that they think will give them satisfaction if they have a lot of it. (Whether they can ever be satisfied is another discussion.)Example: After a long day hiking up the mountain, the hikers were ravenous, inhaling their dinner in a matter of minutes.
Related Words
Ravenous, ravening, voracious suggest a greediness for food and usually intense hunger. Ravenous implies extreme hunger, or a famished condition: ravenous wild beasts. Ravening adds the idea of fierceness and savagery, especially as shown in a violent manner of acquiring food: ravening wolves. Voracious implies craving or eating a great deal of food: a voracious child; a voracious appetite. It may also be used figuratively: a voracious reader.
Other Word Forms
- ravenously adverb
- ravenousness noun
Etymology
Origin of ravenous
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English, from Old French ravineus, equivalent to ravin(er) “to plunder” ( See raven 2 ) + -eus -ous
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 few nights a week, I exit class sweaty and ravenous and walk straight for a grocery store to fill it.
From Salon
Not the ravenous hatred of the murderers and their enablers, but the quiet courage of decent people.
For LAFC’s ravenous fan base, that leaves just one way to go: up.
From Los Angeles Times
The dust bunny under her bed is a ravenous, monstrous thing.
From Los Angeles Times
Just as Google discovered in the 2010s, Nvidia GPUs remain expensive and in short supply compared with ravenous demand, and no one wants to be reliant on one vendor for AI’s most important infrastructure.
From Barron's
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.
