Word of the Day

: July 19, 2017

edacious

adjective ih-DAY-shus

What It Means

1 : having a huge appetite : ravenous

2 : excessively eager : insatiable

edacious in Context

Living with three edacious teenagers, Marilyn and Roger were dismayed by how much they had to spend on groceries week after week.

"... Stone's narrative prowess had been such as to infect me ... with his Weltschmerz. In fairness, Stone alone was not to blame. For too many years my edacious reading habits had been leading me into one unappealing corner after another...." — Tom Robbins, Harper's, September 2004

Did You Know?

Tempus edax rerum. That wise Latin line by the Roman poet Ovid translates as "Time, the devourer of all things." Ovid's correlation between rapaciousness and time is appropriate to a discussion of edacious. That English word is a descendant of Latin edax, which is a derivative of the verb edere, meaning "to eat." In its earliest known English uses, edacious meant "of or relating to eating." It later came to be used generally as a synonym of voracious, and it has often been used specifically in contexts referring to time. That's how Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle used it when he referred to events "swallowed in the depths of edacious Time."