omnivorous
/ɒmˈnɪv(ə)rəs
/adjective
1(Of an animal or person) feeding on a variety of food of both plant and animal origin.Sloth bears are omnivorous and feed on a variety of foods depending on what is available....
- Sea turtles are omnivorous and feed on a variety of sponges, cnidarians, mollusks, crustaceans, algae, plants, and fish.
- He declared that while the red-muzzle mouse is omnivorous and feeds on vegetable and animal organic matter, it is ‘very rare’ that it should consume carrion.
Synonyms
eating a mixed/varied diet, able to eat anything, all-devouring
rare pantophagous, pamphagous, pantophagic, omnivorant
2Indiscriminate in taking in or using whatever is available: an omnivorous reader...
- He was an omnivorous, fast, and extraordinarily retentive reader.
- Though I have been a voracious, omnivorous reader all my life, I haven't been interested in books other than field guides lately.
- Always an omnivorous consumer of journalism, Id begun reading the occasional reference to something called the ‘greenhouse effect’.
Synonyms
undiscriminating, indiscriminate, unselective, uncritical
Derivatives
omnivorously
- Lawyers read omnivorously, for though books were somewhat scarce in the colonial period, there was a lot of time in which to read.
- He spent his time reading omnivorously and engaging in doctrinal squabbles with other left-wing German refugees.
- Amidst all this solemn and committed political life Macmillan had time to keep a diary (with some gaps) and to read omnivorously, mainly but not entirely the English classics.
omnivorousness
- On enumerating some of them, commenters said that these questions were ‘absurd’ and (I think) they thought that I was arguing absurdities, or that I was trying to use them to justify omnivorousness.
- Regulars will know of this column's admiration for the uncritical omnivorousness of the Dutch site.
- This perceived omnivorousness aggravates specialists such as Williams who have painstakingly developed unique disciplines only to see them apparently subsumed under ‘permaculture.’
Origin
Mid 17th century: from Latin omnivorus + -ous.