Primary
''gluttonous'' ▫ᴱᴺ|Definition|1st|20260606185347-00-⌔
gluttonous - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
gluttonous (comparative more gluttonous, superlative most gluttonous)
- Given to excessive eating; prone to overeating.
- ✤ Synonyms: gluttonish, gluttonly
- ✤ Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.1
- Greedy.
- ✤ Then they could smile and fawn upon his debts,/And take down the interest into their gluttonous maws.2
- ✤ [“]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.3
- ✤ 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!4
- ✤ Look your last on your dearest ones,/Brothers and husbands, fathers, sons:/Swift they go to the ravenous guns,/The gluttonous guns of War.5
- ✤ 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.6
- ✤ 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.7
Etymology
From Middle English glotenose, glotenouse, glotonos, glotonous, glotounius, glotynous, from Middle French glotonos; equivalent to glutton + -ous.
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA: /ˈɡlʌt(ə)nəs/
- Audio (Southern England): 🔊
- Hyphenation: glut‧ton‧ous
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Matthew 11:19: ↩
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]: ↩
1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “Higher Laws”, in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 231: ↩
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: ↩
1914, Robert W. Service, The Call: ↩
1929, H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth: ↩
2026 April 1, Vitali Vitaliev, “Literature on the track”, in RAIL, number 1058, page 68: ↩
Secondary
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