-vorous

American  

1. a combining form meaning “eating, gaining sustenance from” that specified by the initial element.

   carnivorous.

---

-vorous British  

combining form

1. feeding on or devouring

   carnivorous

---

Other Word Forms

• -vore combining form

Etymology

Origin of -vorous

< Latin -vorus devouring; -ous

Example Sentences

When young, Jeff would challenge himself to define a word, chasing it down through the dictionary: Fishwife to shrew to shrewmouse to insectivorous to vorous.

From Los Angeles Times

Legendary Montana guide Rusty Vorous once hypothesized that you could tail-tie a Missouri trout to any other trout in the West, and the Missouri trout would drag the other up the river until it drowned.

From Time Magazine Archive

Words having the following terminations are usually accented on the antepenult, or third syllable from the end: cracy, ferous, fluent, flous, honal, gony, grapher, graphy, loger, logist, logy, loquy, machy, mathy, meter, metry, nomy, nomy, parous, pathy, phony, scopy, strophe, tomy, trophy, vomous, vorous.

From Project Gutenberg