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

"He's been giving us a lot of joy. We can see that he's really hungry to succeed, so, at the moment, all the fans and the whole team support him."

Read more on BBC

At the centre of the galaxy is a hungry supermassive black hole, which swallows up lots of material around it and uses the extra energy to spit out intense light beams.

Read more on Space Scoop

“We have a religious belief just like hungry people have a need to eat something,” Jin told The Wall Street Journal in 2011.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

New Jersey is home to some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country — and some of the hungriest.

Read more on Salon

As a result, I have finally broken the habit of working until the last possible moment of the day, when I am suddenly so hungry and cranky that I absolutely can’t work another minute.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

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