starve.
To die because of lack of food or of not eating.
Meaning & usage
To die because of lack of food or of not eating.
To suffer severely because of lack of food or of not eating.
To be very hungry.
I was starving so I wrote S.O.S. on the desert island using rocks.
To kill or attempt to kill by depriving of food.
To make suffer severely by depriving of food.
To force a combatant to submit or surrender by depriving of food, as in a targeted siege.
If they refuse to surrender the garrison, we'll just starve them out.
To force a population center to submit or surrender by depriving of food, as in sieges in international armed conflicts.
Some historians have since classified the Siege of Leningrad as a genocide due to the intentional destruction of the city and the systematic starvation of its civilian population.
To deprive of nourishment or of some vital component.
The uncaring parents starved the child of love.
The patient’s brain was starved of oxygen.
To deteriorate for want of any essential thing.
To kill with cold; to (cause to) die from cold.
I was half starved waiting out in that wind.
To die; in later use especially to die slowly, waste away.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English sterven (“to die, perish”), from Old English steorfan (“to die, perish”), from Proto-West Germanic *sterban, from Proto-Germanic *sterbaną (“to become stiff, die”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)terp- (“to lose strength, become numb, be motionless”); or from Proto-Indo-European *sterbʰ- (“to become stiff”), from *ster- (“stiff”); or a conflation of the aforementioned. Cognate with Scots stairve, sterve (“to die, perish, starve”), Saterland Frisian stjerwa (“to die”), West Frisian stjerre (“to die”), Dutch sterven (“to die”), German Low German starven (“to die”), German sterben (“to die”), Icelandic stirfinn (“peevish, froward”), Albanian shterp (“sterile, unproductive, barren land”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.