voracious applies especially to habitual gorging with food or drink.
teenagers are often voracious eaters
gluttonous applies to one who delights in eating or acquiring things especially beyond the point of necessity or satiety.
an admiral who was gluttonous for glory
ravenous implies excessive hunger and suggests violent or grasping methods of dealing with food or with whatever satisfies an appetite.
a nation with a ravenous lust for territorial expansion
rapacious often suggests excessive and utterly selfish acquisitiveness or avarice.
rapacious developers indifferent to environmental concerns
Examples of rapacious in a Sentence
nothing livens things up like a whole team of rapacious basketball players descending upon the pizza parlor rapacious mammals, such as coyotes, foxes, and bobcats
Recent Examples on the WebIn this rapacious subculture, mobsters went into subdivisions and snapped up a half dozen homes at a time.—Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, 14 Mar. 2024 Katie Porter has fought to defend the well-being of the little guy against rapacious banks and drug companies.—Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 13 Feb. 2024 Activist groups saw the move as a way to sell off public housing to rapacious developers, who would treat residents as expendable.—Curbed, 9 Jan. 2024 China’s housing boom was the biggest the world has seen, and Evergrande’s rise was powered by rapacious expansion, the system that stoked it and foreign investors who threw money at it.—Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times, 5 Dec. 2023 Or is a warming planet and decades of rapacious human industry to blame for everything?—Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times, 30 July 2023 Throughout, Mary was an enthusiastic partner to her husband’s rapacious collecting, convincing sea captains to fill their cargo holds with crates to take back to England.—William Booth, Washington Post, 28 Nov. 2023 Excited by the film’s premise — a retelling of the murder of members of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe for their oil wealth by rapacious whites during the 1920s — fans seemed unaware of those crimes, even though Killers is not the first film version of that history.—Armond White, National Review, 8 Nov. 2023 Been there, done that So on a late-July morning of this hot labor summer, before the rehearsal cranked up, Flores, the son of farmworker-organizer activists, was holding forth on rapacious corporate landlords, the erosion of working class living standards, and why Kevin de León has got to go.—Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times, 18 Aug. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'rapacious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
Etymology
Latin rapāc-, rapāx "given to seizing or catching things (as prey), carrying away, excessively grasping" (from rapere "to seize and carry off" + -āc-, -āx, deverbal suffix denoting habitual or successful performance) + -ious — more at rapid entry 1, audacious
Share