all-consuming

English

Adjective

all-consuming (not comparable)

1. That consumes everything; that uses everything up.

   Google is the all-consuming superpower on the Internet; soon everything will be owned by them.

   • 2012, BioWare, Mass Effect 3 (science fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: The Reapers Codex entry:

     A myth common to several cultures in the galaxy, Reapers were once imagined as space monsters that consumed entire stars. Archaeologists who searched for the sources of such myths found little besides the themes of all-consuming devils that are common to primitive cultures.

   • 2019 January 7, “Exploring the SCP Foundation: Pattern Screamers” (6:12 from the start), in The Exploring Series‎^[1], archived from the original on 11 January 2023:

     It seems that they existed in some sort of previous incarnation of our universe, and use abstract terms to describe their existence, such as "feeding on concepts". They prepared for some sort of ascension, but then the Pattern came, which they describe at first as an all-consuming emptiness, elaborating by saying that anything that passed into it was torn asunder, subjected to a set of principles and order that grinds things down to nothing, in a process of which entropy is just one part.

2. Totally engrossing, using up all of one's time and energy.
   • 2012 July 18, Scott Tobias, “The Dark Knight Rises”, in AV Club‎^[2]:

     Where the Joker preys on our fears of random, irrational acts of terror, Bane has an all-consuming, dictatorial agenda that’s more stable and permanent, a New World Order that's been planned out with the precision of a military coup.

   • 2020 July 15, Paul Clifton, “Brown "hours from stopping the Underground and buses"”, in Rail, page 7:

     Brown revealed that his time as London Transport Commissioner has been all-consuming, describing it as "full-on".

References

• “all-consuming”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.