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Voracious vs Empathy - What's the difference?

voracious | empathy |

As an adjective voracious

is wanting or devouring great quantities of food.

As a noun empathy is

the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person.

voracious

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Wanting or devouring great quantities of food.
  • * 1719 , , Robinson Crusoe , ch. 6:
  • I never had so much as . . . one wish to God to direct me whither I should go, or to keep me from the danger which apparently surrounded me, as well from voracious creatures as cruel savages.
  • * 1867 , , ch. 45:
  • The old man was up, betimes, next morning, and waited impatiently for the appearance of his new associate, who after a delay that seemed interminable, at length presented himself, and commenced a voracious assault on the breakfast.
  • * 1910 , , "The Human Drift":
  • Retreating before stronger breeds, hungry and voracious , the Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar regions.
  • Having a great appetite for anything (e.g., a voracious reader ).
  • * 1922 , , ch. 7:
  • If he carried chiefly his appetite, a zeal for tiled bathrooms, a conviction that the Pullman car is the acme of human comfort, and a belief that it is proper to tip waiters, taxicab drivers, and barbers, but under no circumstances station agents and ushers, then his Odyssey will be replete with good meals and bad meals, bathing adventures, compartment-train escapades, and voracious demands for money.
  • * 2005 , Nathan Thornburgh, " The Invasion of the Chinese Cyberspies," Time , 29 Aug.:
  • Methodical and voracious , these hackers wanted all the files they could find.

    Synonyms

    * See also

    Derived terms

    * voraciously * voraciousness * voracity

    empathy

    English

    Noun

    (wikipedia empathy)
  • the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person
  • capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding
  • She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.
  • (parapsychology, science fiction) a paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions
  • Usage notes

    Used similarly to sympathy, interchangeably in looser usage. In stricter usage, empathy is stronger and more intimate, meaning that the subject understands and shares an emotion with the object – as in “I feel your pain” – while (term) is weaker and more distant – concern, but not shared emotion: “I care for you”.