1 to suffer or die because you do not have enough food to eat; to make sb suffer or die in this way:
[V] The animals were left to starve to death. * pictures of starving children * The new job doesn't pay as much but we won't starve! * [VN] She's starving herself to try to lose weight. * Many of the prisoners looked half starved.
2 (-starved) (in adjectives) not having sth that you need:
supply-starved rebels
seealsoCASH-STARVED
IDIOMS
be starving (for sth) (also be starved especially in AmE) (informal) to feel very hungry:
When's food? I'm starving!
PHRASALVERBS
starve sb into sth / into doing sth to force sb to do sth by not allowing them to get any food or money:
The blockade was aimed at starving the country into submission.
starve sb/sth of sth (AmE also starve sb/sth for sth) [usuallypassive] to not give sth that is needed:
I felt starved of intelligent conversation. * The department has been starved of resources.
starve sb<->out (of sth) to force sb to leave a particular building or area by not allowing them to get any food:
If they won't come out, we'll starve them out!
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for starve is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is starve a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, starve is tagged as verb.
Does starve appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — starve appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
