Relating to or characterized by hunting and feeding on other organisms, or exploiting others in a harmful or opportunistic manner.
From Latin praedatorius, from praedator (plunderer, hunter), ultimately from praeda (prey, booty). The biological sense preceded the metaphorical application to human behavior, with the latter developing in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The extension of 'predatory' from biological hunting to human exploitation reveals how we understand harmful social behavior through the lens of natural phenomena. Terms like 'predatory lending' or 'predatory behavior' leverage our instinctive understanding of hunter-prey relationships to describe complex social and economic dynamics.
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