hungry
Americanadjective
-
hungrier,
comparative
-
hungriest
superlative
-
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"
Looking to grow your vocabulary? Check out this interactive, curated word list from our team of English language specialists at Vocabulary.com – one of over 17,000 lists we've built to help learners worldwide!
Spelling Practice, Unit 1
Interested in learning more words like this one? Our team at Vocabulary.com has got you covered! You can review flashcards, quiz yourself, practice spelling, and more – and it's all completely free to use!
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:
It’s a one-track, single-minded way of thinking, eerily reminiscent of, oh, I don’t know, a hungry coyote blindly pursuing a roadrunner.
From Salon ● Aug. 30, 2026
Both are hungry and tearing up minor-league pitching.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 29, 2026
"Over the summer I rested, I recharged and, yeah, I'm ready and I'm hungry," Palmer, who is now just two goals away from 50 in the Premier League, told Sky Sports.
From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2026
But shopping hungry can lead to expensive mistakes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 20, 2026
The realm of Pain was refusing to close, hungry for the soul at its doorstep.
From "The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest" by Aubrey Hartman
This means we all respond differently to exercise in terms of how many calories we burn or whether a workout makes us feel hungrier later in the day.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 22, 2026
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
Djokovic grew up in war-torn Serbia and has spoken about how his turbulent childhood made him hungrier for success.
From Barron's ● Jan. 31, 2026
The staffing shortage meant her wait ended up being much longer—and hungrier.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2025
As we grow hungrier, more and more men become ill.
From "Blood on the River" by Elisa Carbone
“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
“Professor, you wrote so much about takeout,” my hungriest pupil pushed back, “What’s the deal? You against it now?”
From Salon ● Dec. 11, 2023
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
As K-pop was broadening its global ambitions in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was also expanding its appetite, becoming the hungriest pop music scene on the planet.
From New York Times ● Sep. 22, 2022
Their flesh was firm and sweet and would fill even the hungriest stomach.
From "The Girl Who Married a Lion: and Other Tales from Africa" by Alexander Mccall Smith
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.
