hungry

[huhng-gree]

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.

hungry

/ 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

Other Word Forms

• hungrily adverb
• hungriness noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of hungry¹

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

Synonym Study

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 ).

Example Sentences

After that, I would get hungry for a hoagie.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year.

Read more on Salon

"After struggling the whole last summer, I was hungry for runs, and there's no better place to be hungry than a flat Adelaide pitch in 40-degree heat," says Cook.

Read more on BBC

The defendant's lawyer told reporters after the ruling the driver "felt deeply ashamed that it led to a trial," as "he was simply hungry in the early morning and ate a Choco Pie."

Read more on Barron's

It isn't easy for a manager to keep a squad of this depth hungry, together and fighting for the shirt, but also responding in the right way when not in the team.

Read more on BBC

Related Words

• eager 
• greedy 
• keen 
• ravenous 
• starved www.thesaurus.com