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.
-
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:
While they might be energy hungry, there are ways in which electricity system operators can manage that hunger so that supply and demand are matched.
From BBC ● Sep. 15, 2026
People wait like hungry dogs at their food dish for influencer Caitlin Covington’s annual fall photo dump.
From Salon ● Sep. 14, 2026
Companies working on AI are hungry for more computing power, which is in short supply relative to the demands of the industry.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 10, 2026
Each season of this lighthearted comedy thriller—inspired by the French “gentleman detective” Arsène Lupin created in the early 1900s by Maurice Leblanc—has left fans hungry for more.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 9, 2026
All five were hungry and tired and sea-stained, but Nighthand’s face was alight with excitement.
From "Impossible Creatures" by Katherine Rundell
This means we all respond differently to exercise in terms of how many calories we burn or whether a workout makes us feel hungrier later in the day.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 22, 2026
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
Come Nov. 1, they still will be pawns, but hungrier.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 29, 2025
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
“Certainly,” replied the Mathemagician; “what did you expect? The more you eat, the hungrier you get. Everyone knows that.”
From "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster
“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
The honeybees that Tsuruda studied decreased foraging during the eclipse, as they usually would at night, except for those from the hungriest hives.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 7, 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
Nobody can do that, not even the hungriest magician in the world.
From "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie
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.
