starved

1. 1
   adjectivecolloquialemphatic

   Feeling extremely hungry.

   After skipping lunch and working straight through the afternoon, I was completely starved.

   The hikers reached camp starved and ready to eat anything.

   Similarfamished, ravenous, hungry

   Oppositefull, stuffed, sated

   Note

   Hyperbole for an ordinary appetite: nobody who says it is in any danger. It lives in speech, almost always after be or feel (I'm starved!), and it keeps company with other exaggerations, as in George Johnston's Skyscrapers in the Mist (1946): "I'm starved. I could eat a horse." Keep it out of formal writing, where it could be read as the literal, emaciated sense.

2. 2
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of starve.

   Thousands starved when the harvest failed two years running.

   The neglected cattle had starved in the back field.

   Note

   Because starve works both with and without an object, the participle cuts two ways. Without an object it takes have: the cattle had starved. With one it builds passives, including the siege sense of forcing surrender: the garrison was starved into submission. That passive use is the bridge to the adjective, since a starved animal is one that has been starved.

   After months of blockade, the garrison was starved into surrender.

   The besiegers starved the town until its leaders opened the gates.

3. 3
   adjective

   Deprived of nourishment, or of something else that is vital.

   The roots were starved of oxygen in the waterlogged soil.

   Decades of underfunding left the schools starved of basic resources.

   Similardeprived, bereft, short, devoid

   Note

   The figurative stretch of the word, where what is missing need not be food. Shakespeare, writing c. 1588–1593, compares a comfortless kiss to frozen water offered to a starved snake, a creature short of warmth rather than a meal. In current prose the missing thing is usually named with of: starved of light, of attention, of funds. That phrase signals that the lack is broader than hunger.

4. 4
   adjective

   Approaching starvation; emaciated and malnourished from prolonged lack of food.

   The starved prisoners were almost unrecognizable to their families.

   Veterinarians treated the starved, dehydrated puppies through the night.

   Similaremaciated, malnourished, underfed, skeletal

   Oppositewell-fed, nourished

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