Visual Dictionary: Hedonist
Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.
There is no dearth of English words for seekers of pleasure. Sybarite and voluptuary are pretty good synonyms for hedonist. A sensualist is a person given to indulging the senses and appetites.
There are many more words expressing similar ideas, but with notable differences. For instance, an oenophile is a connoisseur of wines, but a carouser is a drunk.
Epicure, epicurean, gastronome, and gourmand all mean “lover of fine food and wine.” A glutton is a person who eats too much.
These words have negative connotations:
Debauchee – a debauched person, “addicted to excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures”
Lecher – as one GRE student put it, “It means perv.”
Libertine – a person who is morally or sexually unrestrained
Rake – “a dissolute or profligate person, esp. a man who is licentious”
And finally, wanton, bacchanalian, and dionysian are related adjectives.
Wanton has the sense of totally letting yourself go, which makes it a nice word for the covers of romance novels, but it can also pop up in the sense of “wanton violence” or “wanton disregard for human life.”
The GRE instructor hesitated when asked what bacchanalian means: there is not a dictionary definition in the world that doesn’t contain the word “orgiastic.”
You wouldn’t believe what that guy suggested on the first date — and before we’d even gotten our appetizer. When I reminded him of the place’s “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” policy, he rolled his eyes and suggested the same thing to our waitress. What a rake.
It took months before she came up with the perfect name for her burlesque-themed Asian broth company: Wanton Soup.