Voracious or veracious readers? Commonly confused words (7-8)

3-minute read

[7-8 of 44 commonly confused words]

I’ve seen a few profiles on Twitter of people who call themselves “veracious readers“. Presumably they mean “voracious readers“. If so, their self-styled title is deeply ironic: even if they read a lot, they cannot be very attentive to the spelling of their reading matter.

Merriam-Webster drolly quips that a voracious reader ‘couldn’t put it down’ while a voracious reader ‘admits they’re just at book club for the wine’. 

Voracious refers to people who eat a lot, and then, as a metaphor, to people who engage in an activity with great gusto and enthusiasm. At several removes, it’s related to the verb devour, since both derive from Latin vorāre. The classic noun that goes with it is reader, but other voracious things or people are appetite, eater, hunger, consumer and demand. 

Customs revenues have risen, along with Americans’ voracious appetite for foreign goods.

By ten, I was already a voracious reader. 

Americans, the most voracious consumers in the world, are doing something completely different these days .

Veracious, in contrast, is a really rather rare word, meaning “truthful”, e.g. a veracious witness to great and grave events. So, a “veracious reader” would be a truthful one, though I doubt that is the claim people describing themselves as such are making. Like voracious, it too derives ultimately from Latin, from the word for “true”, vērus, which has given us words such as verify, verity, and the vera of Aloe vera.

Here’s a nice quotation about a book of poems:

There’s an uncomfortably veracious centrepiece poem, Closure, about the untidy end of a marriage, which says it all, leaving the narrator spotting his reflection in the kettle, “a tiny bulbous shape puzzling at itself”.

Veracious is also used by mistake in phrases such as *veracious appetite instead of the correct voracious appetite.

Of course, veracious may be just a homophone typo for voracious. What I mean is that it is fatally easy to have two words in your mental lexicon that sound exactly the same, and to key one instead of the other, such as “two” for “too“. You know the difference, but when you type with only half a mind on what you’re doing, the wrong one takes over.

In case you’re not convinced that the two words sound the same, here is the phonetic spelling of voracious /vəˈreɪʃəs/, and here it is for veracious: /vəˈreɪʃəs/. Identical. The villain of the piece is that tricksy little symbol /ə/, which occurs in the first and last syllables. It represents the “uh” sound known as a “schwa“, which is responsible for a huge number of spelling mistakes in English.