hungry

American  

[huhng-gree] / ˈhʌŋ gri /

adjective

hungrier, hungriest

1. having a desire, craving, or need for food; feeling hunger.

   Synonyms:

   ravenous

   Antonyms:

   satiated

2. indicating, characteristic of, or characterized by hunger.

   He approached the table with a hungry look.

3. strongly or eagerly desirous.

4. lacking needful or desirable elements; not fertile; poor.

   hungry land.

5. marked by a scarcity of food.

   The depression years were hungry times.

6. Informal. aggressively ambitious or competitive, as from a need to overcome poverty or past defeats.

   a hungry investment firm looking for wealthy clients.

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hungry British  

/ ˈhʌŋɡrɪ /

adjective

1. desiring food

2. experiencing pain, weakness, or nausea through lack of food

3. having a craving, desire, or need (for)

4. expressing or appearing to express greed, craving, or desire

5. lacking fertility; poor

6. informal

   1. greedy; grasping

   2. stingy; mean

7. (of timber) dry and bare

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Synonym Usage

Hungry, famished, starved describe a condition resulting from a lack of food. Hungry is a general word, expressing various degrees of eagerness or craving for food: hungry between meals; desperately hungry after a long fast; hungry as a bear. Famished denotes the condition of one reduced to actual suffering from want of food, but sometimes is used lightly or in an exaggerated statement: famished after being lost in a wilderness; simply famished ( hungry ). Starved denotes a condition resulting from long-continued lack or insufficiency of food, and implies enfeeblement, emaciation, or death (originally death from any cause, but now death from lack of food): He looks thin and starved. By the end of the terrible winter, thousands had starved ( to death ). It is also used as a humorous exaggeration: I only had two sandwiches, pie, and some milk, so I'm simply starved ( hungry ).

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• hungriness
  noun
• hungrily
  adverb

Etymology

Origin of hungry

First recorded before 950; Middle English, Old English hungrig. See hunger, -y ¹

Explanation

Are you hungry? If your stomach is growling, you're probably hungry, which is how you’d describe that uncomfortable feeling in your gut when you go too long without eating food. Feeling hungry is a gnawing sensation that can be fixed by eating something. For some people, getting food isn’t so easy, and you’ll see poor folk on the street with a hungry look in their eyes. If your hunger has a particular food in mind, you could say that you are "hungry for” that food, like being hungry for macaroni right after seeing a commercial about macaroni.

Example Sentences

He later recalled walking miles to save bus fares and often going to bed hungry.

From BBC • Jun. 6, 2026

A record 13 people were killed by bears in Japan last year, and there has been a jump in sightings as the animals emerge hungry from hibernation.

From Barron's • Jun. 5, 2026

All Wall Street needs to sell SpaceX stock to a hungry public is a semi-plausible narrative.

From MarketWatch • Jun. 4, 2026

The meal wasn’t as good as the pizza I had for just a handful of euros, and I went back to the pizzeria, hungry for more.

From Salon • Jun. 3, 2026

Now she was so hungry she would even eat cooked carrots without gagging.

From "Earthquake Terror" by Peg Kehret

Related Words

• eager
• greedy
• keen
• ravenous
• starved