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hungry

[ huhng-gree ]
/ ˈhʌŋ gri /
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See synonyms for: hungry / hungrily / hungriness on Thesaurus.com

adjective, hun·gri·er, hun·gri·est.
having a desire, craving, or need for food; feeling hunger.
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.

OTHER WORDS FOR hungry

1 ravenous, famishing, starving.

OPPOSITES FOR hungry

1 sated, satiated, surfeited.
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Origin of hungry

First recorded before 950; Middle English, Old English hungrig. See hunger, -y1

synonym study for hungry

1. 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 WORDS FROM hungry

hun·gri·ly, adverbhun·gri·ness, noun
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

How to use hungry in a sentence

British Dictionary definitions for hungry

hungry
/ (ˈhʌŋɡrɪ) /

adjective -grier or -griest

Derived forms of hungry

hungrily or hungeringly, adverbhungriness, noun
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
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