ravening
- 1Fiercely voracious and greedy, driven by an intense hunger to devour or seize.
Like a wildfire that devours everything in its path and is never satisfied.
The ravening pack of hounds tore through the underbrush after the stag.
Famine drove the ravening mob to break into the city's granaries.
Similarravenous, voracious, rapacious, predatory, insatiable
Note
The hunger it names is a hunter's, because it is the present participle of the obsolete verb raven, "to prey." Its classic partner is the wolf: the King James Bible of 1611 warns of false prophets who are "inwardly ravening wolves," and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet sets "wolvish-ravening lamb" beside "dove-feather'd raven." Said of people, it keeps that predatory edge, as when relatives circle a lottery winner.
- 2A rapacious eagerness for plunder, expressed through robbery and extortion.
Like a collector who keeps demanding more than is owed and seizes the rest.
The warlord's ravening left whole villages stripped of their harvests.
Centuries of ravening by raiding fleets emptied the temple treasuries.
Similarrapacity, plunder, rapine, pillage, depredation
Note
The wolf moves into the moral life here. The King James Bible of 1611 charges the Pharisees with insides "full of ravening and wickedness." Thomas Cranmer lists "woluish rauening & deuouring" among the lusts to be killed, the same pairing with devouring found in the feeding sense. Thomas Ellwood's lazy drone, living on the bees' labors, shows its parasitic side.
- 3The predation of an animal upon its prey; voracious eating or consumption.
The shepherd's flock was thinned by the ravening of mountain wolves.
[B]ut his fate that night was due to change, his days of ravening had come to an end.
1999, Seamus Heaney, BeowulfNote
Tudor writers turned this predator's noun on people at table. Erasmus's advice on manners, in Robert Whittington's 1532 translation, pairs "rauenyng and deuourynge" as habits fit for thieves, and John Caius counts it among the excesses behind disease. Poets kept the word alive: Wilfrid Gibson in 1943 uses it for the endless, fiery hunger of a furnace. Reserve it for elevated or literary prose.
Less common meaning
- 4Subjected to the voracity of a predator; being preyed upon and devoured.
The ravening hare lay broken beneath the falcon's talons.
Away with him into the open fields, To be a rauening pray to Crowes and Kites:
c. 1590, G[eorge] P[eele], The Old Wiues Tale.Note
Here the hunger points the other way. The word marks the victim rather than the eater, as if the participle of the obsolete verb raven, "to prey," had turned passive. It belongs to Elizabethan English and sits almost always before prey, as in George Peele's "a ravening prey to crows and kites" (c. 1590). A modern reader will likely hear the greedy, devouring sense instead, so keep this one to that phrase or to a deliberately archaic style.
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Origin
It comes from the present participle of the now-obsolete verb 'raven', meaning 'to prey'.