starve
pronunciation
How to pronounce starve in British English:
UK [stɑːv]
How to pronounce starve in American English:
US [stɑːrv]
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- Verb:
- be hungry; go without food
- die of food deprivation
- deprive of food
- have a craving, appetite, or great desire for
- deprive of a necessity and cause suffering
Word Origin
- starve
- starve: [OE] Starve means etymologically ‘be stiff’ – it goes back to a prehistoric Germanic base *star-, *ster- ‘be stiff’, which also produced English starch, stare, etc. The ‘stiffness’ of a corpse led to its use for ‘die’ – a meaning which it retains in the related German sterben and Dutch sterven. In English, however, from the 12th century onwards, starve gradually narrowed down in meaning to ‘dying from cold’ (which survived into the modern era in northern dialects) and ‘dying from hunger’.=> starch, stare, stork
- starve (v.)
- Old English steorfan "to die" (past tense stearf, past participle storfen), literally "become stiff," from Proto-Germanic *sterban "be stiff" (cognates: Old Frisian sterva, Old Saxon sterban, Dutch sterven, Old High German sterban "to die," Old Norse stjarfi "tetanus"), from PIE root *ster- (1) "stiff, rigid" (see stereo-). The conjugation became weak in English by 16c. The sense narrowed to "die of cold" (14c.); transitive meaning "to kill with hunger" is first recorded 1520s (earlier to starve of hunger, early 12c.). Intransitive sense of "to die of hunger" dates from 1570s. German cognate sterben retains the original sense of the word, but the English has come so far from its origins that starve to death (1910) is now common.
Example
- 1. It was easier to let leningrad 's inhabitants starve .
- 2. It might not be your dream job , but you 're not going to starve .
- 3. Though the system often fails , the poorest are not simply left to beg and starve .
- 4. An effective way to battle cancer is to starve the cancer cells by not feeding it with the foods it needs to multiply .
- 5. The curfew is a response to the case last month of a young couple who allowed their baby to starve to death while they raised a virtual child in an online game .