Brobdingnagian appetite
- noun
- /ˌbrɒb.dɪŋˈnæɡ.i.ən ˈæp.ɪ.taɪt/
- He sat down to dinner with a Brobdingnagian appetite, devouring everything in sight.
Examples
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He has a Brobdingnagian appetite for pizza!
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The chef was amazed by his guest’s Brobdingnagian appetite and kept bringing out more food.
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Despite her slender build, she was famous for her Brobdingnagian appetite at family gatherings.
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The child's Brobdingnagian appetite surprised everyone at the party.
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Despite her slender build, she was famous for her Brobdingnagian appetite at family gatherings.
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The chef was amazed by his guest’s Brobdingnagian appetite and kept bringing out more food.
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He sat down to dinner with a Brobdingnagian appetite, devouring everything in sight.
Synonyms
A very strong desire for more food, money or success
An unusually strong urge to eat much more than normal
A habit of eating too much in a greedy way
A very strong wish to eat and drink a lot
A very strong desire to eat too much
Very strong hunger that makes you want to eat a lot
A very greedy way of eating a lot of food
A very strong desire to eat a lot
Wanting too much food and eating more than needed
Antonyms
How Hungry
Surface Forms
Morphology
The adjective 'Brobdingnagian' means extraordinarily large, so when combined with 'appetite' the phrase straightforwardly denotes an extremely large or voracious appetite. The meaning follows the normal adjective+noun compositional pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both constituent meanings would be able to infer the MWE's meaning, although the adjective itself is rare and literary in origin.
Etymology
The phrase Brobdingnagian appetite comes from Jonathan Swift's story 'Gulliver's Travels', where the people called Brobdingnagian are giants. Thinking of a giant with a huge appetite gives the image, so it means 'a very large appetite'.