starving

Pluralstarvings

1. 1
   adjective

   Extremely hungry; feeling an intense, pressing need to eat.

   By the end of the long meeting, everyone was starving.

   She felt starving after skipping both breakfast and lunch.

   Similarravenous

   Oppositefull, stuffed, sated

   Note

   Here the word has become a true adjective. It can be graded (more starving, most starving), and it can follow feel or seem, which the participle of starve cannot. After be the two blur, so everyone was starving could be read either way. After feel, only the adjective fits. Its near synonym is ravenous.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of starve.

   The besieged city was starving as its supplies ran out.

   He kept starving himself in pursuit of an unhealthy ideal.

   Note

   The verb form carries both directions of starve. Intransitively the subject goes without food (the city was starving); transitively someone withholds it (starving a garrison into surrender). As a gerund it can take its object through of and reach beyond food: Joseph Stiglitz, in The Guardian Weekly in 2013, blamed "the starving of the public sector" for America's lost opportunity.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The condition of suffering or dying from a prolonged lack of food.

   Survivors of the camp testified about the beatings and starvings they had endured for years.

   Relief workers raced to prevent further starving among the refugees.

   Similarstarvation, hunger, famine

   Note

   A countable noun where starvation names a condition. It takes a plural, starvings, which turns that condition into a series of separate events done to people. Margaret Carrington's Ab-Sa-Ra-Ka, Land of Massacre (1868) uses the plural this way, setting "the starvings and the flights and the extinguishments" side by side. When you mean a single episode or the general state, starvation is the plainer choice.

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