- 1餓壞了、飢腸轆轆（也可以是對某事物極度渴望）
If you are ravenous, you are extremely hungry — hungry enough to eat a lot, and quickly. It is a common, slightly colourful word; people say it after a long walk or a skipped meal, even when they are not truly starving. You can also be ravenous for something that is not food: ravenous for news, ravenous for attention. That stretch is ordinary now. Though actually, it does not come from the bird raven. It comes from an older idea of hunting and seizing prey; the bird story is one people repeat because ravens do gulp food, and it sounds as if it should be true. The sister word (hungry and dangerous, of animals) is the literary cousin; ravenous is the one you can use at the table.
組成From Middle English ravenous, ravynous, from Old French ravineus. By surface analysis, ravin + -ous. The root is about predation, not the black bird; the bird story is folk etymology, even though nestling ravens can look frantically hungry.
同家族的字
- raveningsame predation root: hungry and dangerous, mostly of animals in books
- ravenouslythe adverb: in a very hungry way
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
ravenousadj/ˈɹævənəs/
- 1
Very hungry.
- The most rapid and most seductive transition in all human nature is that which attends the palliation of a ravenous appetite. There is something humiliating about it.
- You must remember no one had eaten a thing for several days. They were ravenous. So for a while there was no conversation at all. There was only the sound of crunching and chewing as the animals attacked the succulent food.
- 2
Greedy, characterized by strong desires.
- Supply-and-demand? One begins to be weary of such work. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause: — it is the Gospel of Despair!
- Mrs. Michael turned out to be a ravenous, fast-fading woman in a slashed skirt and a low blouse over an unappetising chest. While her husband did things in his shed, where he appeared to live, Pym inexpertly mixed the Yorkshire pudding and fought off her embraces...
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。