esurient

adj

1. (formal, humorous, often)Very greedy or hungry; ravenous; (figuratively) avid, eager.

   “So that (as I apprehend) theſe Famelick, Eſurient, and Sitient Spirits are not the Ferments product of Concoction in the Ventricle, but only incentives, ordained by nature to render us deſirous of Aliment, to repair the decaying frame of our Body.”

   “Calcin'd Hartſhorn being a mere Terra damnata, wholly bereav'd of all Salts, muſt needs, as it boils in Water, imbibe the Salt of that Water, and leave its Pores empty and eſurient: And then that eſurient Water taken into our Viſcera and Veſſels, will greedily ſuck into it whatſoever Salts it finds, and will carry them out of the Body with it.”

   “Nay, is it not cunning (couple it with an esurient character) the natural consequence of defective intellect? It is properly the vehement exercise of a short, poor vision; of an intellect sunk, bemired; which can attain to no free vision, otherwise it would lead the esurient man to be honest.”

   “Caron Beaumarchais (or de Beaumarchais [Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais], for he got ennobled) had been born poor, but aspiring, esurient; with talents, audacity, adroitness; above all, with the talent for intrigue: a lean, but also tough indomitable man.”

   “That girl with her back to us who waits / For her man to come home for his tea / Will wait until the paint disintegrates / And ruined dikes admit the esurient sea; […]”

noun

1. One who is greedy or hungry.

   “Sure it is that he [Philip Nye] was a moſt dangerous and ſeditious Perſon, a politick Pulpit driver of Independency, an inſatiable eſurient after riches, and what not to raiſe a family and to heap up wealth.”

   “[S]ome noble sportsmen have, I hear, with a view to improve their [i.e., young foxes'] physique and to initiate them early into training, supplied the young esurients and their mammas and papas with Spratt's dog biscuits, by a due course of which food it may be supposed, theoretically, they would be put on a level with their pursuers so far as condition went, while their wily instincts would be so much weight in their favour in the great handicap 'twixt fox and hound.”