Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Avid   /ˈævəd/  /ˈævɪd/   Listen
Avid

adjective
1.
(often followed by 'for') ardently or excessively desirous.  Synonyms: devouring, esurient, greedy.  "An avid ambition to succeed" , "Fierce devouring affection" , "The esurient eyes of an avid curiosity" , "Greedy for fame"
2.
Marked by active interest and enthusiasm.  Synonym: zealous.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Avid" Quotes from Famous Books



... hast made his mouth Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, All beauty, and all starry majesties, And dim transtellar things;—even that it may, Filled in the ending with a puff of ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... after Mayne Reid discovered that writing books in which not too many people died, and there was not too much violence, was better business than writing as he did at first. There are three boys living with their father, now just a little disabled, but an avid collector of natural-history specimens. The father says he would give almost anything for the hide of a white buffalo, and that such a beast exists cannot be disputed. The boys volunteer to get up an expedition to bring back ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... age, have no rest with our teeth. Our mouths are too small. For many ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid, sensual will. We have been converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have become soft and un-quickened. Where in us are the sharp ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... look up Esther thought that his wife's expression would have given him rather a shock. For the moment her beauty was quite altered. With her lip caught between her teeth and her eyes narrowed with a sort of avid, calculating sharpness, she appeared a different person. It was curious how anxiety ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... of us, standing on the edge of the gutter, was a little, ancient, distinguished dame, who had been watching the scene with quick, avid eyes. She turned her fierce, scornful face up to the Colonel, and said, "Yes, sir! You are right. It's a show, just a show, for the townsmen. Yet I remember that, thirty years ago, the fathers of these spiritless ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... in a word now. "Actually, any one of them would possibly do, but we have a head start with Esperanto. Some years ago both Jack and I became avid Esperantists, being naive enough in those days to think an international language would ultimately solve all man's problems. And both Homer and Isobel seem to have a working ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... the rich, and most of the present manual working class would become superfluous. The only reply, so far as I know, to this line of argumentative forecast is that it does not happen. The world is at present so avid of wealth, so eager for more things to use or consume, that however quickly iron and copper replace flesh and blood, the demand for men keeps pace with it. Anyway, unemployment in the twentieth century has so far been less ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... so avid of honourable and affectionate remembrance after death? Why should we hold this the one thing worth living or dying for? Why should all that we can know or feel seem but a very little thing as compared with that ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan's-pipes (shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer's avid Italian eyes, to milk "per due centesimi"—say, a farthing's worth—into an outstretched, close-clutched jug. Sometimes the almond orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves of ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... l. lxxi. p. 1190. Hist. August. in Avid. Cassio. Note: See one of the newly discovered passages of Dion Cassius. Marcus wrote to the senate, who urged the execution of the partisans of Cassius, in these words: "I entreat and beseech you to preserve my reign unstained by senatorial blood. None of your order must perish either by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... reactions, reflexes, adjustments and stimuli. For all his complexity there was something so childlike in his nature that he never realized what an infliction he was, nor how tiresome his conversation could become to people who were not quite so avid of "disinterested thought." Living alone and spending too much time in unprofitable studies, his language was apt to be professionally devoid of humour—a defect he made heroic efforts to remedy by what he called the "Falernian system." It was the fault ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... revolted at the very thought of the barbaric farce of an inquest—the small morgue chapel crowded to the doors with goggle-eyed, blood-loving humanity; the stretcher with its sheeted corpse; reporters avid of sensation and primed with questions which, if answered by indiscreet witnesses, would defeat the efforts of police and district attorney; news photographers with their insatiable cameras aimed at every person connected with the case ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin

... debt owed to their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir. Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big gambler's treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard with avid custody the alleged prestige of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... eager munching, mixed with the clatter on china of the empty shells. To extract them, we had the strong thorns, three or four inches long, of the wild acacia; and on these the little brown morsels were carried to the avid mouths and eaten with a bit of bread sopped in the sauce—and then the shell was subjected to a vigorous sucking, that not a drop of the sauce lingering within it should ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... of all this, we expect the working man in his hours of leisure, and after a day physically exhausting, to sit down and work at something intellectual. There are, without doubt, some men so strong and so avid of knowledge that they will do this, but these are not many, and they do not long remain ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... instance, in Act II of the Valkyrie, when Wotan stops the action to give Bruennhilde an elementary lesson in Schopenhauer-cum-Wagner metaphysics. The funny thing is that Wagner never renounced anything: to the end he was greedy, avid of life. He might have benefited by a careful study of Schopenhauer's pungent phrases; but instead of thus developing his own natural gift in that direction, his sentences afterwards grew longer and more complicated than ever. His Beethoven is a splendid ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... preliminary work of approaching these facts it will be well to explain how it can be that so wide and serious an error should have been made by practically all men. The reason is simply that they were men. They were males, avid saw women as females—and ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... enigmas, the Philadelphian far the subtler of the two. Addison was ostensibly a church-member, a model citizen; he represented a point of view to which Cowperwood would never have stooped. Both men were ruthless after their fashion, avid of a physical life; but Addison was the weaker in that he was still afraid—very much afraid—of what life might do to him. The man before him had no sense of fear. Addison contributed judiciously to charity, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... natural orator, not destitute of intelligence. His mother's pet and spoiled child, brought up among the girls of the "flying squadron," he was in a continual state of nervous and sensual titillation that made him avid of excitement and yet unable to endure it. A thunderstorm drove him to hide in the cellar and to tears. He was at times overcome by fear of death and hell, and at times had crises of religious fervour. But his life was a perpetual debauch, ever ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... and Gimp Hines were both quietly avid. Lester knew the most about these things, but Gimp's hands, on the strange camera, were more skillful. The cautious scrutiny of dials and controls marked with cryptic numerals and symbols, and ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... doings of women is so alive and avid among criminological writers that it is hard indeed to find material which has not been dealt with to the point of exhaustion. Does one pick up in a secondhand bookshop a pamphlet giving a verbatim report of a trial in which a woman is the central figure, and does one flatter ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... done things, the men who have experienced the adventures they relate. There is such a vividness, a reality, a conviction about these personal utterances that we must listen respectfully and applaud sincerely. Magazines and newspapers offer hundreds of such articles for avid readers. Hundreds of books each year are based upon ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... the Bingham Construction Company had just got one big building ready for tenancy, or had just been awarded the contract for another; and once, for a week, she had followed the head of it through a particularly stubborn bricklayers' strike with the most avid interest. Indeed, she had only been brought back to herself by a fire which had damaged one of Brower's companies to the extent of five thousand dollars and another to the extent of ten. After that she chained her wandering attention to such matters as short rates and unearned premiums, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... Avid of life and love, insatiate vagabond, With quest too furious for the graal he would have won, He flung himself at the eternal sky, as one Wrenching his chains but impotent ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... flooding the Inns with prospective Bar-maids. He might have spared his apologetics, for there was no opposition. The LORD CHANCELLOR welcomed the Bill on behalf of the Government, and expressed the conviction that the Benchers, though not "avid of this change," would nevertheless loyally co-operate if Parliament saw fit to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various

... himself engulfed, as it were, in the bottomless depths of that long, clear gaze, that went over him like the surge of great waters, and drenched his consciousness to the core. Brand-new Eve might have looked thus at brand-new Adam, sinlessly, virginally, yet with an avid and fearful questioning and curiosity. For the second his heart shook and reeled in his breast. Then the dark lashes fell and veiled the shining glance. Her face was once more indifferent ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... of the performance always draws screams of laughter from the spectators. The whole ends with a vivid but very comic representation of the avid consumption of the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... who had just been given a sentence to Bedford startled him out of his thoughts. She pleaded and cried, she tried to throw herself at the judge's feet, but the policeman dragged her out, the crowd craning forward with avid interest. She was the last case before the court adjourned. Jarvis leaned across the rail and asked the probation officer if he might speak ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... (noun), helpa (adj.). Avalanche lavango. Avarice avareco. Avaricious avara. Avaunt for de tie cxi! Avenge vengxi. Avenue aleo. Average (n.) mezonombro. meza kvanto. Averse antipatia, kontrauxa. Aversion antipatio, kontrauxo. Avert deturni. Avidity avideco. Avid avida. Avoid eviti. Avow konfesi. Avowal konfeso. Await atendi. Awake veki. Awake (intrans.) vekigxi. Awaken veki. Award aljugxi. Aware, to be scii. Away! for! Away malproksime. Awe teruro, timego. Awful terura. Awkward mallerta, malgracia. Awl borileto. Awning ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... his blame in this respect, and it will be recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadowless portrait led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, which he afterwards issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid reader of memoirs, and of political memoirs in particular, but he almost always passed upon them the same criticism—that they were too public. "I don't want Mr. ——," he would say, "to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up the file of the Morning Post. I want him ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse



Words linked to "Avid" :   wishful, zealous, enthusiastic, avidness, desirous



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com