(v. t.) To eat up with greediness; to consume ravenously; to feast upon like a wild beast or a glutton; to prey upon.
(v. t.) To seize upon and destroy or appropriate greedily, selfishly, or wantonly; to consume; to swallow up; to use up; to waste; to annihilate.
(v. t.) To enjoy with avidity; to appropriate or take in eagerly by the senses.
Example Sentences:
(1) She devoured political science texts, took evening classes at Goldsmiths college, and performed at protests and fundraisers, but became disillusioned.
(2) On land, sand miners have devoured whole swaths of beach, from Jamaica to Russia.
(3) I gaze at it across the street and, as if by magic, I ache with longing, just as I used to in the days when a trip here was the most enjoyable thing I could possibly imagine: when books were all I wanted, when I thought of them as pieces of ripe fruit, waiting to be peeled and devoured.
(4) Within half an hour, George Galloway – the native of Dundee, MP for Bradford West, a former Labour MP for inner Glasgow, and figurehead of the Respect party – is sitting in Wetherspoon's, devouring fish and chips and granting about a dozen requests for photographs.
(5) The contents of the posterior cranial fossa are actively "sucked up", "devoured" by the latter.
(6) Kentucky secretary of state Alison Lundergan Grimes began the night recalling that the soon-to-be nominee loves lifestyle TV “and can devour buffalo wings”.
(7) She reels off esoteric book recommendations ("I just devoured this great book about the mistaken theories of pre-historic sexuality.
(8) Tissue samples from partly devoured carcasses contained T. spiralis larvae, implicating cannibalism as a major vehicle for the spread of T. spiralis in the herd.
(9) This is the real deal, what people want, what they can’t wait to devour.
(10) Partners of depressives experience themselves often as being totally in their hands respectively "devoured" by them.
(11) But now players devour it.” Jürgen Klinsmann was the conduit in 2004 when he became Germany’s head coach.
(12) Desperate and with nowhere else to go, eventually I found a cheap hotel, which devoured my dwindling resources.
(13) Growing up in 1940s French Algeria, the young Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent dreamed of Paris: a bullied outcast at school, he escaped into fantasy at home – devouring his mother's fashion magazines, sketching endlessly, and predicting (in the safety of his adoring family circle, at least) a future of spectacular fame.
(14) The monster the US has unleashed on the rest of the world is steadily devouring its own.
(15) I say to them: ‘Five minutes with this guy, and he’ll win you over.’” In a quiet restaurant in the City on Friday afternoon, over a selection of steak cuts that he devours efficiently, Joshua talks without edge about Fury, about his opponent in London on Saturday night, Dillian Whyte, and about himself.
(16) We tend to take our harmless fun where we find it – even if, like KidZania, it’s on the top floor of the next scourge devouring Bangkok, a giant shopping mall.
(17) Like other contemporary artists, Allen Jones being an obvious example, he devoured and then recycled the imagery of popular American magazines.
(18) I’m not being ironic: the bogs of western Britain and Ireland don’t freeze as they do in Scandinavia, so the geese can devour the roots of marshy plants on which they depend.
(19) The reef will also be aided by an $89m boost to programs such as the Reef Trust, a Coalition plan to improve water quality and tackle threats such as a plague of starfish which has devoured much of the reef’s coral.
(20) Applying pragmatism to her desire to learn English under communism, she devoured technical manuals and copies of the Morning Star .
Idiom
Definition:
(n.) The syntactical or structural form peculiar to any language; the genius or cast of a language.
(n.) An expression conforming or appropriate to the peculiar structural form of a language; in extend use, an expression sanctioned by usage, having a sense peculiar to itself and not agreeing with the logical sense of its structural form; also, the phrase forms peculiar to a particular author.
(n.) Dialect; a variant form of a language.
Example Sentences:
(1) Case studies of two anorectic women from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, show that for some anorectics self-starvation is encoded in religious idioms and symbols about the body, food, and self.
(2) Ali Motahari, an influential MP, said after Trump’s win that his presidency was to Iran’s advantage because Democrats “would chop your head with cotton”, a Persian idiom which means killing someone with kindness, and reflecting a view that the Islamic Republic has historically coped better with the Republicans.
(3) This study compared the comprehension of 20 idioms of normal children with children exhibiting mild mental retardation.
(4) Our hypothesis is that they can reach an idiomatic competence if idioms are presented within a rich informational environment allowing children to grasp their figurative sense.
(5) A contemporary idiom blurs not only Flaubert's precision but the shocking and revolutionary nature of the work, which makes more sense when set back in its own time and context.
(6) Six experiments examined why some idioms can be syntactically changed and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John laid down the law can be passivized as The law was laid down by John), while other idioms cannot be syntactically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket cannot be passivized into The bucket was kicked by John).
(7) An attempt is made to show how personal concerns of the dreamers are mediated through the culturally shared idiom of the saint.
(8) "A dialogue of the deaf", as it has been translated into an English idiom, is a conversation between two people who cannot listen to each other.
(9) But they were not tired-and-emotional, and for such mannerly foreigners to have been given a practical definition of that local idiom would have been gilding the lily.
(10) In Experiment 1, idioms referring to the same temporal stage of a conceptual prototype were judged to be more similar in meaning than idioms referring to different temporal stages.
(11) These results suggest that adults with unilateral brain damage can activate and retrieve familiar idiomatic forms, and that their idiom-interpretation deficits most likely reflect impairment at some later stage of information processing.
(12) Experiment 3 was designed to investigate children's production of idioms as compared to the comprehension abilities explored in experiments 1 and 2.
(13) Our thesis was that the syntactic behavior of idioms is determined, to a large extent, but speakers' assumptions about the way in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole.
(14) By establishing a broad understanding of the problem of knowledge, this new view of epistemology is developed within the idiom of each psychiatric approach.
(15) When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.'
(16) Although this idiom is necessarily expressed through language, it is more than language.
(17) Hickman parries this by pointing to such non-rock Record Store Day releases as a 7-inch single by One Direction and three albums of classical music conducted by Herbert von Karajan, but it seems to me that the point is almost incontrovertible: to use the vocabulary of the 1980s, much of the energy that goes into the event is unmistakably rockist, and the festivities often feel like a day-long benefit for an entire musical idiom: Live Aid meets the Antiques Roadshow, with the aim of keeping the guitars ringing out for another year.
(18) Dolezal does not discuss her own ethnicity in detail in her numerous writings on civil rights issues, but in several pieces she uses idioms such as “our cultural memory” when speaking about African American history.
(19) "You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics.
(20) Experiment 6 showed that the metaphoric information reflected in the lexical makeup of idioms also determined the metaphoric appropriateness of idioms in certain contexts.