hungry
Americanadjective
-
hungrier,
comparative
-
hungriest
superlative
-
having a desire, craving, or need for food; feeling hunger.
- Synonyms:
- ravenous
- Antonyms:
- satiated
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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
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desiring food
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experiencing pain, weakness, or nausea through lack of food
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having a craving, desire, or need (for)
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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:
Nobody calculates how hungry they are with their entrée still twenty minutes away.
From Salon ● Oct. 7, 2026
They are hungry to exploit their edge in a market that has been swarmed by recreational traders betting on sports and elections—while it lasts.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 3, 2026
Investors hungry for AI exposure have come to see Microsoft as “one of the highest-quality platforms in technology,” he said.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 29, 2026
And if hungry, it will strike “at almost any sideways movement.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 29, 2026
Its eyes raked the boat; they were hungry eyes, globular and bulging.
From "Impossible Creatures" by Katherine Rundell
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
The staffing shortage meant her wait ended up being much longer—and hungrier.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2025
"As China steps onto the global stage, it is hungrier for talent than ever before," the article adds.
From BBC ● Oct. 1, 2025
“They are getting hungrier and hungrier. Nobody kills chickens these days, and so there are less entrails for them to eat.”
From "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
By all rights, Chief Executive Robert Davis should be the hungriest shopper in the aisle.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 19, 2026
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
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
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.
