hungry
Americanadjective
-
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:
I would come home from the sanctuary hungry and make rice and eggs—if not that evening, then the following morning.
From Salon ● Jul. 28, 2026
When Esther Lopez went to her son’s bedroom to check if he was hungry, she found him slumped over on a table, cold to the touch.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 25, 2026
"I'm always hungry to score or to give the final pass to my team-mates. And I can say I work hard for the team, also in the defensive part."
From BBC ● Jul. 23, 2026
A select few employers hungry for talent go well beyond that.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 19, 2026
She would stand there looking down at him, and she would say, "Are you hungry again?" in an amazed voice.
From "All About Sam" by Lois Lowry
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
He and two of his closest allies, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Transport Minister János Lázár, struggled to keep pace with their younger and hungrier opponent as they toured the country.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 12, 2026
The Gunners boss said Arsenal are "hungrier than ever" and that the defeats do not change the importance of the last-eight match against Sporting.
From BBC ● Apr. 6, 2026
We became irritable and sat apart from each other, as if sitting together made us hungrier.
From "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah
“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
I’m usually the hungriest really late at night, so I might order something against my better judgment like the hippy vegan ramen from Tatstu.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 5, 2025
In war-torn Gaza, he said, no one has enough to eat and the tiny strip accounts for 80% of the 700,000 hungriest people in the world.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 13, 2024
I rejected meatloaf when I was at my hungriest, sealed my lips shut when my mother tried to shove it in my toddler mouth back in the 80s.
From Salon ● Jun. 11, 2023
To avoid the woman she had to tiptoe down the hall like a mouse trying to escape the hungriest of cats.
From "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" by Bette Bao Lord
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.
