Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Eating food of any kind, including animals and plants.
  • adjective Taking in everything available, as with the mind.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • All-devouring; eating food of every kind indiscriminately; specifically, of or pertaining to the Omnivora: as, omnivorous animals: often used figuratively: as, an omnivorous reader.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective All-devouring; eating everything indiscriminately.
  • adjective (Zoöl.) Eating both animal and vegetable food.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Having a diet which is neither exclusively carnivorous nor herbivorous.
  • adjective figuratively Having an interest in a variety of subjects.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective feeding on both plants and animals

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Latin omnivorus : omni-, omni- + -vorus, -vorous.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the Latin omni, all and -vore.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word omnivorous.

Examples

  • So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world.

    links for 2008-04-10 « Skid Roche 2008

  • They are best described as omnivorous, their diet consisting of fruit, including grass seeds, and in most cases other animals, either hunted or scavenged, along with anything else available and easily digested.

    Ardi is a million years older than Lucy - The Panda's Thumb 2009

  • And of these latter some may be called omnivorous, inasmuch as they feed on every kind of juice, as for instance, the common fly; others are blood-suckers, such as the gadfly and the horse-fly, others again live on the juices of fruits and plants.

    The History of Animals 2002

  • That's the goal of the so-called omnivorous engine.

    Autoblog Green 2009

  • That's the goal of the so-called omnivorous engine.

    Autoblog Green 2009

  • But more importantly, the divide between the powerful and non-powerful people in society seems to relate to those who are 'omnivorous', engaging both in old fashioned snob culture classical music, ballet, reading classic books, etc and more popular forms.

    Hobbies key to class, says study 2011

  • Those who have climbed the social ladder tend to be 'omnivorous', enjoying popular culture such as football as well as 'snob culture'.

    Hobbies key to class, says study 2011

  • I sometimes throw in "omnivorous" alongside "omniscient" and "omnipotent" when mentioning the classic attributes ascribed to God, just to see whether people are paying attention, or are pleased as long as what is said about God is prefaced by "omni".

    Time To End The Kindergarten Revolution James F. McGrath 2009

  • Amazingly she doesn't think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the 'omnivorous' search engine -i.e. one which is able to take a user's total context - where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on.

    Daily Dispatch: Google works towards intuitive search; Most hacked software of 2009 2009

  • I don't want to give the impression that -- the key thing about him was a kind of omnivorous, insatiable curiosity.

    Isaiah Berlin: A Life 1999

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.