Meaning & use
ravenous
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Meanings
adjectivecomparable
Feeling extremely hungry and wanting to eat a great deal at once.
Grammar: Can follow a linking verb or come before a noun: I am ravenous; a ravenous appetite.
Patterns
- be ravenous
- feel ravenous
- a ravenous appetite
After the long hike, we were all ravenous.
The ravenous children finished the pizza in minutes.
I skipped lunch and now I am absolutely ravenous.
adjectivebefore a nounfigurative
Having a very strong, greedy wish for something that is hard to satisfy.
Grammar: Used figuratively before nouns such as appetite, hunger or demand.
Patterns
- ravenous for something
- a ravenous demand
The public had a ravenous appetite for celebrity gossip.
The factory has a ravenous demand for cheap labor.
She was ravenous for knowledge and read every book in the library.
Word forms
| comparative | more ravenous |
|---|---|
| superlative | most ravenous |
Common combinations
- ravenous appetite
- Teenagers often have a ravenous appetite.
- feel ravenous
- I always feel ravenous after swimming.
- ravenous hunger
- A ravenous hunger drove him to the kitchen at midnight.
- ravenous wolves
- The story featured ravenous wolves in the snow.
- ravenous for
- The crowd was ravenous for news.
Synonyms and how they differ
- starving
- Starving is more casual in speech and, like ravenous, is often an exaggeration, but it is less formal.
- famished
- Famished is close in meaning but is a little old-fashioned and less used for a greedy desire.
- voracious
- Voracious usually describes a habitual, huge appetite (a voracious reader) rather than hunger at one moment.
- hungry
- Hungry is much weaker and can describe any need to eat, while ravenous means intensely hungry.
Opposites
Word family
- ravenously adverb
- in an extremely hungry or greedy way
- ravenousness noun
- the state of being extremely hungry
- raven verb
- an old word meaning to hunt for prey or to devour
- ravage verb
- to destroy or damage badly
Commonly confused: ravenous or raven? ravenous or ravishing?
ravenous vs raven
A raven is a black bird, not a state of hunger, though the words share a spelling.
ravenous vs ravishing
Ravishing means extremely beautiful and has nothing to do with hunger.
Practice
We hadn't eaten since dawn, so by evening everyone was ____.
Choose one answer.
Ravenous means extremely hungry. Ravishing means very beautiful, which looks similar but does not fit hunger.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “ravenous”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.