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Mar 16, 2010
This week's theme
Words about food and eating

This week's words
salmagundi
edacious
olla podrida
prandial
gallimaufry

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

edacious

PRONUNCIATION:
(i-DAY-shuhs)

MEANING:
adjective: Devouring; voracious.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin edere (to eat). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ed- (to eat, to bite) that has given other words such as edible, comestible, obese, etch, fret, and postprandial.

USAGE:
"For too many years my edacious reading habits had been leading me into one unappealing corner after another, dank cul-de-sacs littered with tear-stained diaries, empty pill bottles, bulging briefcases, broken vows, humdrum phrases, sociological swab samples, and the (lovely?) bones of dismembered children."
Tom Robbins; In Defiance of Gravity; Harper's (New York); Sep 2004.

See more usage examples of edacious in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers? -Joseph Wood Krutch, writer and naturalist (1893-1970)

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