esurient(adjective) ee-SYUR-ee-ent or ee-SUR-ee-ent
Rapacious, greedy, hungry.
It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation of writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it would be better if the stream were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest English books were closed, than that esurient book-makers should continue and debase a brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, a famous race.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing. Amazon
The child’s imagination will also be awake and active at five. [...] He will be living on a great flat earth - unless some officious person has tried to muddle his wits by telling him the earth is round; amidst trees, animals, men, houses, engines, utensils, that are all capable of being good or naughty, all fond of nice things and hostile to nasty ones, all thumpable and perishable, and all conceivably esurient.
Saint-Antoine, baulked, esurient, pounces on the slain warhorse; flays it; roasts it, with such fuel, of paling, gates, portable timber as can be come at.
The Bible devotes a lot of space to gulosity in general, let alone the excesses of Lot, Belchezzar, Herod and other esurient characters, killing fatted calves, selling birthright for pottage and glaring examples of edacity.
Paul Johnson, The Spectator, 4 July 2007.
The Spectator
The focus for this relentless and at the same time wonderfully funny enquiry is a pair of oddly assorted thirtysomething women: Alison, fat, esurient and permanently exhausted by her trawls around the Psychic Fayres and spirit-hands-have-touched-me expositions of south-east England; Colette, thin, bad-tempered and lately detached from her complacently self-absorbed husband (‘Any abstraction, indirection or allusion was wasted on Gavin, and in fact even the most straightforward form of communication … was a challenge to his attention span.’)
Unattributed review, The Spectator, 7 May 2005, The Spectator
of Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. Amazon