What's the difference between devour and prey?

Devour


Definition:

  • (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 .

Prey


Definition:

  • (n.) Anything, as goods, etc., taken or got by violence; anything taken by force from an enemy in war; spoil; booty; plunder.
  • (n.) That which is or may be seized by animals or birds to be devoured; hence, a person given up as a victim.
  • (n.) The act of devouring other creatures; ravage.
  • (n.) To take booty; to gather spoil; to ravage; to take food by violence.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Unlike most birds of prey, which are territorial and fight each other over nesting and hunting grounds, the hen harrier nests close to other harriers.
  • (2) The concentration of prey and the ciliate mean cell volume, dry weight, and number per milliliter were determined at known growth rates.
  • (3) This unusual pattern of unbalanced growth may represent an adaptation by bdellovibrios to maximize their progeny yield from the determinate amount of substrate available within a given prey cell.
  • (4) We have four Money Shops in Medway: they know they can prey on the vulnerable, and most residents can't pay back on time.
  • (5) Plethodontid salamanders capture prey by projecting the tongue from the mouth.
  • (6) About 2 weeks after metamorphosis, midwife toads Alytes obstetricans judge the size of a prey object mainly in scales of visual angle.
  • (7) As the outer wall was dissolved, outgrowth began with the elongation of the germinant as it emerged from the prey ghost as an actively motile cell.
  • (8) In the present study the chemical composition of the venom was examined in order to determine the presence of constituents that may have physiologically important actions on the prey.
  • (9) The fate of those black boys and men rested in the hands of a racist system that preys on the fear and vulnerability of their parents.
  • (10) Paradoxical sleep is associated with a factor related to predatory danger, which suggests that large amounts of this sleep phase are disadvantageous in prey species.
  • (11) The latency increase is not likely to be due to motor fatigue, since it can be partially reversed by dishabituation with an alternate prey species.
  • (12) Two cases are considered: mutualism with the prey and mutualism with the first predator.
  • (13) At the same time, cetaceans are under threat from a variety of pressures including direct and indirect takes, pollution, and competition for habitat and prey.
  • (14) A wide range of suggested functions found in the literature include food acquisition, prey attack, aggression and attack behavior, facial expression in intraspecies communications, dispersion of pheromones, maintaining head position in swimming, and a wide range of environmental monitoring (e.g., current detection in water, wind direction on land).
  • (15) We suggest that the first step of the prey-catching sequence is to adjust the accommodative state of the lenses and thus lock the visual apparatus on to a stimulus.
  • (16) They prey on the population, kidnapping and extorting in cahoots with criminal gangs, according to multiple complaints filed to the human rights commission.
  • (17) For much of the film, Deckard refuses to identify himself with his prey; after all, that might make him no better than an organic machine.
  • (18) Phage typing was performed on 795 strains of Staphylococcus aureus isolated from poultry, a turkey, pigeons, and birds of prey in Japan and 4 countries in Europe, using the avian phage set of typing phages plus 6 others.
  • (19) Functional morphologists commonly study feeding behavior in vertebrates by recording electrical activity from head muscles during unrestrained prey capture.
  • (20) The strong reactivity of the two positive yellow baboon sera with SIVagm proteins raises questions about whether these animals may have been infected by green monkeys in their native habitat; baboons occasionally prey upon and eat green monkeys.