hungry
Americanadjective
-
hungrier,
comparative
-
hungriest
superlative
-
having a desire, craving, or need for food; feeling hunger.
- Synonyms:
- ravenous
- Antonyms:
- satiated
-
indicating, characteristic of, or characterized by hunger.
He approached the table with a hungry look.
-
strongly or eagerly desirous.
-
lacking needful or desirable elements; not fertile; poor.
hungry land.
-
marked by a scarcity of food.
The depression years were hungry times.
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Informal. aggressively ambitious or competitive, as from a need to overcome poverty or past defeats.
a hungry investment firm looking for wealthy clients.
adjective
-
desiring food
-
experiencing pain, weakness, or nausea through lack of food
-
having a craving, desire, or need (for)
-
expressing or appearing to express greed, craving, or desire
-
lacking fertility; poor
-
informal
-
greedy; grasping
-
stingy; mean
-
-
(of timber) dry and bare
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
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
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.
Vocabulary lists containing hungry
"The Three Chicarrones"
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Spelling Practice, Unit 1
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Supporters say the laxer regime could encourage more companies to go public; investors, hungry for data on corporate performance, oppose less-frequent reporting.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 17, 2026
At a gleaming new factory in China's central hinterland, masked workers in white uniform season and sift through mounds of latiao, a longtime popular snack that has found hungry fans overseas.
From Barron's ● Aug. 14, 2026
"Matthias has always been very hungry," he said.
From BBC ● Aug. 11, 2026
Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper.
From Salon ● Aug. 6, 2026
The cub was cold, wet, and very hungry.
From "Wolf Brother" by Michelle Paver
Not only do sugar spikes contribute to the long-term development of metabolic disease, it can also leave you hungrier by midmorning than if you had eaten nothing at all.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 21, 2026
Overall, the findings show that animals do not simply become hungrier when nutrients are missing.
From Science Daily ● May 28, 2026
Djokovic grew up in war-torn Serbia and has spoken about how his turbulent childhood made him hungrier for success.
From Barron's ● Jan. 31, 2026
They prioritized ”big people that move fast,” explained Miller, saving scholarship offers for players who were hungrier to improve than to become famous.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2025
I shove everything into my mouth at once with both hands, licking my fingers deliciously.Yet the more I eat the hungrier I become.
From "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers" by Loung Ung
“All of us, from the wealthiest and most powerful of men to the weakest and hungriest of children, share one precious possession: the name American.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 22, 2026
New Jersey is home to some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country — and some of the hungriest.
From Salon ● Oct. 11, 2025
Astronomers claimed on Monday that they had discovered what might be the hungriest, most luminous object in the visible universe — a supermassive black hole that was swallowing a star a day.
From New York Times ● Feb. 21, 2024
If we know we are no longer sending our best players out against the world, can we at least go back to sending our hungriest?
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 14, 2023
Immigrant girls, the girls who worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, were the hungriest of all.
From "Night Owls" by A.R. Vishny
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
