English

Etymology

From Middle English glotenose, glotenouse, glotonos, glotonous, glotounius, glotynous, from Middle French glotonos; equivalent to glutton +‎ -ous.

Pronunciation

Adjective

gluttonous (comparative more gluttonous, superlative most gluttonous)

  1. Given to excessive eating; prone to overeating.
    Synonyms: gluttonish, gluttonly
  2. Greedy.
    • c. 1605–1608 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Tymon of Athens”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene iv]:
      Then they could smile and fawn upon his debts, / And take down the interest into their gluttonous maws.
    • 1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “Higher Laws”, in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 231:
      ["]The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly," … "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid.
    • 1865 October 28, Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”, in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, New York, N.Y.: […] [Peter Eckler], →OCLC, stanza 24, page 29:
      Do the feasters gluttonous feast? / Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors? / Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, / Pioneers! O pioneers!
    • 1914, Robert W. Service, The Call:
      Look your last on your dearest ones, / Brothers and husbands, fathers, sons: / Swift they go to the ravenous guns, / The gluttonous guns of War.
    • 1929, H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth:
      One day the mail-man found no village there, / Nor were its folk or houses seen again; / People came out from Aylesbury to stare – / Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain / That he was mad for saying he had spied / The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.
    • 2026 April 1, Vitali Vitaliev, “Literature on the track”, in RAIL, number 1058, page 68:
      My dreams were largely based on the works of Dickens (his Mugby Junction stories), Thackeray (Jeames on the Gauge Question), and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories I kept devouring with gluttonous abandon.
    • 2026 September 3, Stephen Buranyi, “‘A crisis of authenticity’: the truth about food influencers”, in The Guardian‎[1]:
      The most popular account in the UK – with 2.4 million followers on Instagram and 1.2 million on TikTok – is Eating With Tod, featuring the preternaturally excitable Toby Inskip, who rubs his hands together and hangs his mouth open in gluttonous ecstasy behind gargantuan mounds of roasted and fried meats.

Derived terms

Translations

source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gluttonous