Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
also predaceous, 1713, from stem of predation (Latin praedari) + -acious.
Wiktionary
a. (alternative spelling of predaceous English)
WordNet
adj. hunting and killing other animals for food [syn: predaceous]
living by or given to victimizing others for personal gain; "predatory capitalists"; "a predatory, insensate society in which innocence and decency can prove fatal"- Peter S. Prescott; "a predacious kind of animal--the early geological gangster"- W.E.Swinton [syn: predaceous, predatory]
Usage examples of "predacious".
Through glass panes the visitor may watch on the sand below the antics of the local clown-slimes, as well as the predacious stone-tigers and the sinuous twisters.
To wit, to sign one of your noble and predacious tomes for our parish library, hoping that is not too magnanimous an imposture for such a gran signore --?
Khan Attila having recently died and the rest of his predacious Huns having fled back eastward toward Sarmatia, whence they had come.
Sergeant bent over and examined the strands like a predacious bird about to pounce on a tasty tidbit of titmouse.
Canada as a highly organized military Power, its policies directed by an aggressive, predacious and unscrupulous government, and with a population larger than that of the United States.
Mundin, looking at the three titans of finance, saw predacious jungle animals.
And I have heard it said that to places like Lisconnel their pickings and stealings have at worst never been so serious a matter as those of another flock, finer of feather, but not less predacious in their habits, who roosted, for the most part, a long way off, and made their collections by deputy.
I told him he seemed to be getting one hell of a long way from stomping or not stomping a little brown insect, and he told me that the spider is not an insect at all but an eight-legged predacious arachnid of the order Araneae.
He was a perfect specimen, that is, of the hawk or predacious type in the genus homo.
I told him he seemed to be getting one hell of a long way from stomping or not stomping a little brown insect, and he told me that the spider is not an insect at all but an eight-legged predacious arachnid of the order Araneae.