devour

Verb

1. To eat quickly, greedily, hungrily, or ravenously.
   • Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. - 2017 [2013], Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press,...

   Synonyms: gobble gorge wolf engorge

2. To rapidly destroy, engulf, or lay waste.
   • The fire was devouring the building.
   • If ye refuse[…]ye shall be devoured with the sword. - 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Isaiah 1:20:
   • Blast after blast, fiery outbreak after fiery outbreak, like a flaming barrage from within,[…]most of Edison's grounds soon became an inferno. As though on an incendiary rampage, the fires systematically devoured the...

   Synonyms: consume devastate overwhelm

3. To take in avidly with the intellect or with one's gaze.
   • She intended to devour the book.
   • Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her food those...
   • 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...
4. To absorb or engross the mind fully, especially in a destructive manner.
   • After the death of his wife, he was devoured by grief.

   Synonyms: devastate overwhelm

5. Synonym of eat: to be very good at something; to slay.
   • She devoured! She left no crumbs!

   Synonyms: go hard kick ass bang devour eat eat and leave no crumbs excel kick rock rule shine slap slay