RAVENOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does ravenous mean? 

• RAVENOUS (adjective)
  The adjective RAVENOUS has 2 senses:

1. extremely hungry

2. devouring or craving food in great quantities

  Familiarity information: RAVENOUS used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• RAVENOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Extremely hungry

Synonyms:

esurient; famished; ravenous; sharp-set; starved

Context example:

fell into the esurient embrance of a predatory enemy

Similar:

hungry (feeling hunger; feeling a need or desire to eat food)

Derivation:

ravenousness (excessive desire to eat)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Devouring or craving food in great quantities

Synonyms:

edacious; esurient; rapacious; ravening; ravenous; voracious; wolfish

Context example:

voracious sharks

Similar:

gluttonous (given to excess in consumption of especially food or drink)

Derivation:

ravenousness (excessive desire to eat)

 Context examples 

Black holes are famous for being ravenous eaters, but they do not eat everything that falls toward them.

(NuSTAR Probes Black Hole Jet Mystery, NASA)

A few minutes later she brought in three covers, and we all drew up to the table, Holmes ravenous, I curious, and Phelps in the gloomiest state of depression.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Sharks, marine scientists say, are often misunderstood, described as ravenous man-eaters.

(Sharks, the seagrass protectors, National Science Foundation)

Buck was ravenous.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been sustenance to him.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess; burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The sun had far descended, and I still sat on the shore, satisfying my appetite, which had become ravenous, with an oaten cake, when I saw a fishing-boat land close to me, and one of the men brought me a packet; it contained letters from Geneva, and one from Clerval entreating me to join him.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

After a short silence, he told me, he did not know how I would take what he was going to say: that in the last general assembly, when the affair of the Yahoos was entered upon, the representatives had taken offence at his keeping a Yahoo (meaning myself) in his family, more like a Houyhnhnm than a brute animal; that he was known frequently to converse with me, as if he could receive some advantage or pleasure in my company; that such a practice was not agreeable to reason or nature, or a thing ever heard of before among them; the assembly did therefore exhort him either to employ me like the rest of my species, or command me to swim back to the place whence I came: that the first of these expedients was utterly rejected by all the Houyhnhnms who had ever seen me at his house or their own; for they alleged, that because I had some rudiments of reason, added to the natural pravity of those animals, it was to be feared I might be able to seduce them into the woody and mountainous parts of the country, and bring them in troops by night to destroy the Houyhnhnms’ cattle, as being naturally of the ravenous kind, and averse from labour.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Sharks have a reputation as ravenous hunters and apex predators, but new analysis of fossil records shows that some of the earliest sharks might have been filter feeders, taking in water through their mouths and catching food particles — think less great white and more anchovy, another filter feeder.

(Ancient sharks likely more diverse than previously thought, National Science Foundation)