To perish from hunger.<\/p>\n
Synonyms for hungry range from the native English starving to the French sounding famished to the Latin voracious. The first of these, starve, came to mean to weaken with hunger in the early sixteenth century. Prior to that, daring back to the tenth century, the word existed in Old English as steorfan, but it simply meant to die; Chaucer, for example, writes in Troilus and Cressida that Jesus “starved” on the cross. Even further back, steorfan evolved from the Indo-European ster, meaning stiff, the connection being that creatures become stiff when they die. The Indo-European ster also evolved into a host of other words, including starch (used to stiffen fabric), stern (your face becomes stiff when you feel stern), stare (your gaze “stiffens” when you stare at something), startle (your body becomes stiff when startled), and even stork (that bird’s long and awkward legs result in a seemingly stiff gait). The last half of cholesterol, too, derives from Indo-European ster, because cholesterol is a solid or “stiff” substance. In contrast, the word famish has few known relatives, apart from famine. The word was adopted from French more than five hundred years ago, and ultimately comes from a Latin source, but it retains a Gallic feel due to its obvious connection to faim, one of the first words that Anglophones learn when studying French: “J’ai faim”\u2014”I’m hungry.” In contrast, voracious seems deeply imbued with its classical heritage. It was adopted directly from Latin, where the verb vorare means to devour; indeed, the word devour itself derives from this Latin source. Earlier on, vorare evolved from the Indo-European gwere, meaning to swallow. This ancestry means that voracious is related to other words that also developed from gwere, such as craw, regurgitate, and even bronchitis. Other synonyms for hungry include ravenous, peckish, and leer. The first of these, ravenous, evolved in the fifteenth century from the Late Latin rapinare, meaning to plunder, which in turn derived from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize, which also gave rise to the English words ravish, rape, and rapid. Raven, however, is not related to ravenous. The name of that large, black bird is Germanic in origin, but confusion of the two words may have contributed to the raven’s reputation as a ravenous thief. Peckish, on the other hand, does have a bona fide connection to birds. In the late eighteenth century, the tendency of birds to peck at their food prompted some forgotten soul to invent peckish as a word for moderate hunger. As for leer, that adjective dates back to the thirteenth century, where it meant empty. In the nineteenth century, the word came to be used, at least in some parts of England, as a synonym for hungry. If the word is known at all nowadays, it is only in the old saying, “Better a lean purse than a leer stomach.” The verb leer\u2014meaning to gaze at someone suggestively\u2014 is unrelated to the “hungry” leer.<\/p>\n
To have little or no food or nourishment.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To perish from hunger. Synonyms for hungry range from the native English starving to the French sounding famished to the Latin voracious. The first of these, starve, came to mean to weaken with hunger in the early sixteenth century. Prior to that, daring back to the tenth century, the word existed in Old English as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n