Adjective: rapacious
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more rapacious |
| Superlative | most rapacious |
Sample Sentences
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To presume a want of motives for such contests [of power between states] as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. [1787, Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 6: Concerning Dangers from Dissensions Between the States:]
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Relations between the Waveney Valley Railway and the E.C.R. [Eastern Counties Railway] soon became strained, because of the rapacious attitude adopted by the latter, and to the mismanagement which it displayed in working the smaller company's line. [1952 June, B. D. J. Walsh, “The Waveney Valley Line”, in Railway Magazine, page 365:]
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Big Tech companies, on the other hand, have proven themselves to be rapacious capitalists—they take as much as they can and ask for permission later. [2021 March 16, Noam Cohen, “Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up”, in Wired, →ISSN:]
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The rapacious maw of our despair [2022, “Nevermore”, performed by Lamb of God:]
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A Prince […] sooner becomes hated by being rapacious and by interfering with the property and with the women of his subjects, than in any other way. [1910, Niccolò Machiavelli, “Chapter XIX”, in Ninian Hill Thomson, transl., The Prince:]
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Even the rapacious birds appeared to comprehend the nature of the ceremony, for […] they once more began to make their airy circuits above the place[…] [1827, James Fenimore Cooper, “Chapter XIII”, in The Prairie:]
Adjectives inflected like rapacious
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
Perhaps from rapacity + -ous, in any case ultimately from Latin rapāx (“grasping, greedy”) + -acious. See: Latin Adjectives '
rapāx'.