Verb

(en verb)

To eat quickly, greedily, hungrily, or ravenously.

To rapidly destroy, engulf, or lay waste.

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*Bible, (w) i. 20

If ye refuseye shall be devoured with the sword.

*{{quote-book, year=2006, author=(w)

, chapter=1, title= Internal Combustion , passage=Blast after blast, fiery outbreak after fiery outbreak, like a flaming barrage from within,

To take in avidly with the intellect.

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*:Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy […] distilling therefrom an acid envy that robbed her napoleon of all its savour.

To absorb or engross the mind fully, especially in a destructive manner.

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Verb

(en verb)

(slang) To eat or consume greedily.

He snarfed a whole bag of chips in a couple of minutes!

*1999 : Marya Hornbacker, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia , page 239

Freed from the usual inhibitions, we get home and I snarf down pasta salad right out of the Tupperware container

*2000 : Nancy Woodruff, Someone Else's Child , page 40

"I'm not going to sit there while you two watch me snarf a whole pie by myself."

*2003 : Allen D. Berrien, Powerboat Care and Repair: How to Keep Your Outboard, Sterndrive, Or Gas-Inboard Boat Alive and Well , page 41

The old 40-horse models used to snarf up more fuel than today's 90-horse models.

(slang) To take something by dubious means, but without the connotations of stealing; to take something without regard to etiquette.

I snarfed a bunch of freebies from the vendor's booth when he wasn't looking.

*1995 : Tom Shanley, Don Anderson, ISA System Architecture , page 296

Either write-through or write-back policy caches may snarf the data that the bus master is writing to memory.

*1996 : Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , page 399

... in addition, the embedding enables the designer to snarf features from the underlying language

*2001 : Brad A. Myers, Choon Hong Peck, Jeffrey Nicols, Dave Kong, and Robert Miller, Interacting at a Distance Using Semantic Snarfing , in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 305-314.

Other future applications of the semantic snarfing idea might include classrooms, where students might snarf interesting pieces of content from the instructor's presentation;

(slang) To expel fluid or food through the mouth or nostrils accidentally, usually while attempting to stifle laughter with one's mouth full.

It was so funny, I snarfed my milk onto my keyboard.

(transitive, slang, computing) To slurp (computing slang sense); to load in entirety; to copy as a whole.

I snarfed the whole database into my program.