devour

This is one of those words that sounds as hungry as it means. Latin gave it a little tactical shove—dē, “down, away”—and then handed it vorāre, “to swallow,” so the whole thing is basically “swallow down and away.” That vor- piece shows up in voracious and voracity, those elegant words for appetite that sound like they arrived in a silk robe but are really just cousins of a mouth wide open. By the early 14th century English was already using devouren for beasts and people, and by the late Middle Ages it could describe fire, plague, books, even grief chewing through a person from the inside. Say someone was devoured by ambition and you can almost hear the Latin machinery clicking: something goes in, and something larger gets swallowed too.