starve
Formsstarves, starving, starved
- 1To feel very hungry.
Whenever I skip lunch, I absolutely starve by the afternoon.
The children were starving after a full day at the lake.
- 2To die as a result of a lack of food or of not eating.
Without aid, refugees in the besieged city could starve within weeks.
Countless people starved during the prolonged drought.
Note
The core modern sense is a narrowing. Old English steorfan simply meant "to die," from a Germanic root for growing stiff. That history is why starve to death is the usual pattern ("36 percent of the people starved to death"). The bare verb now leans toward suffering from hunger, so the phrase makes the fatal outcome explicit.
- 3To suffer severely as a result of a lack of food or of not eating.
Families starve whenever the harvest fails two years running.
The villagers were starving long before help finally arrived.
Similarhunger
Note
Suffering short of death is where half-starved belongs: "the little half-starved, stunted girl of twelve" is badly underfed, not dying. The compound is the usual way to grade the hunger, and it is hyphenated before a noun. Spenser in 1591 already writes of men "driuen be perforce to steruing," with the older -e- spelling that stays close to Old English steorfan.
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- 6To keep something from getting the nourishment or the vital element it needs.
The drought starved the river of the runoff it normally received.
Engineers warned that the redesign would starve the engine of fuel.
Similardeprive, rob, strip, drain
Note
The working construction is starve something of something: a child "starved of love," a brain "starved of oxygen." It sits comfortably in the passive, and the of-phrase names what is missing. Older poets used it without the of. Donne has a "stomack sterv'd," and Dryden in 1685 fears penury will "sterve the Royal Vertues of his Mind," extending the metaphor to virtues and minds.
- 7To force enemy combatants to submit or surrender by cutting off their food supply, as in a targeted siege.
The besieging army slowly starved the garrison into capitulation.
Generals sometimes prefer to starve a defending force rather than attack.
Note
Siege language favors the phrasal verb starve out: "we'll just starve them out." The out points to the goal, which is forcing defenders to give up their position. The object is usually the garrison or its soldiers, not a place. When the target is a whole town and its people, the verb shifts to its dated, city-directed counterpart.
- 8
- 9To cause a person or animal to die of cold or exposure.
Close the window before you starve the bairns in here.
That east wind would starve a body to death up on the tops.
Oppositewarm
Note
Northern English, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire, uses the word for cold, not hunger. "I was half starved waiting out in that wind" means chilled through. In John Hartley's 1869 almanac, a man who is starved walks round the house until he gets warm again. Readers from outside the region can easily mistake it for the hungry half-starved. The weather in the sentence is the clue.
Less common meanings
- 10To compel a town or city to give in or surrender by cutting off its food supply, as in a siege during a war between states.
The besieging army set out to starve the capital into submission.
Occupiers starved entire towns to break civilian resistance.
Note
The verb with a city as its object now sounds dated. Present-day writing about such sieges tends to use the noun instead. Historians write of "the systematic starvation of its civilian population" at Leningrad, and some classify that siege as genocide. When the targets are soldiers rather than a population, the siege-of-combatants sense remains the ordinary choice.
- 11To perish, especially, in later use, by slowly wasting away.
Note
This is the general "die" that the hunger sense narrowed from, and it survives only in older writing. In Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), a woman was "like to sterue" by a cruel knife, a death with no hunger in it at all. Spenser's spelling sterue rhymes with serue and kerue. The obsolete past participle starven belongs to the same older stage of the language.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English sterven and Old English steorfan ("to die, perish"), tracing back to Proto-Germanic *sterbaną ("to become stiff, die"). Its deeper origin is uncertain: possibly from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to lose strength, become numb" or one meaning "to become stiff," or a blend of both. It is related to Dutch sterven and German sterben ("to die").