hungry

The bodily sense, and the word's shape shows its origin plainly: Old English hungriġ is simply hunger plus the adjective-forming -y, with close cousins in Dutch hongerig, German hungrig and Swedish hungrig. It compares regularly, the y turning to i in hungrier and hungriest. The figurative uses, from eager desire to poor, barren soil, all borrow from this physical need.

Desire borrows the language of appetite, and the extension reaches beyond people. Shakespeare's Cassius has "a lean and hungry look" (1599), where hunger signals ambition. In Alton Locke (1850), Charles Kingsley's "cruel, hungry foam" gives the sea an appetite for the drowned. In everyday use it takes for or to: hungry for success, hungry to learn.

Here the hunger moves from the eater to its cause, so the adjective describes the activity, not the person doing it. It works best before a noun, as in hungry work. Placed after the verb, as in "the gardening was hungry," it would sound odd or slide back into the plain bodily sense.

Land is pictured as starved itself, too poor to feed what grows in it: a hungry soil, a hungry clay. The hunger belongs to the ground, which lacks what crops need and passes that want on to anything planted there. Shakespeare's Coriolanus reaches for "the pebbles on the hungry beach," where bare shingle stands for the most barren ground imaginable.