gluttonous

comparative more gluttonous · superlative most gluttonous

1. Given to excessive eating; prone to overeating.

   Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.

   1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Matthew 11:19

   Synonyms: gluttonish, gluttonly

2. Greedy.

   Then they could smile and fawn upon his debts, / And take down the interest into their gluttonous maws.

   c. 1605–1608 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Tymon of Athens”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene iv]

   5 more examples

   ["]The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly," … "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid.

   1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “Higher Laws”, in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 231

   Do the feasters gluttonous feast? / Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors? / Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, / Pioneers! O pioneers!

   1865 October 28, Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”, in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, New York, N.Y.: […] [Peter Eckler], →OCLC, stanza 24, page 29

   Look your last on your dearest ones, / Brothers and husbands, fathers, sons: / Swift they go to the ravenous guns, / The gluttonous guns of War.

   1914, Robert W. Service, The Call

   One day the mail-man found no village there, / Nor were its folk or houses seen again; / People came out from Aylesbury to stare – / Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain / That he was mad for saying he had spied / The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.

   1929, H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth

   My dreams were largely based on the works of Dickens (his Mugby Junction stories), Thackeray (Jeames on the Gauge Question), and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories I kept devouring with gluttonous abandon.

   2026 April 1, Vitali Vitaliev, “Literature on the track”, in RAIL, number 1058, page 68