Hungry means needing food. I am hungry, hungry children, hungry enough to eat anything. English uses be with it, not have — I am hungry, never I have hunger — and that is the single most useful thing to know about the word.
It stretches to any strong want: hungry for success, hungry for news, a hungry look. That figurative use is common in sport and business writing and always means eager rather than starving. Note the family: hunger is the noun, and starving is the informal exaggeration people actually use — I'm starving means I would like lunch. Peckish is the mild British version, meaning slightly hungry.
1adjectivehungryNeeding or wanting food.~98%
“The children were hungry by four o'clock.”
2adjectivewantingWanting something very much.~2%
“The team came back hungry for a win.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
hungry is a state of wanting food.
Old English hungrig is hunger plus the -y that turns a noun into an adjective, the same pattern as thirsty, dusty and greedy. The noun is the older word and shares a root with German Hunger and with words for craving across the Germanic languages.
Proto-Indo-European
*kenk-
Proto-Germanic
*hungrugaz — hungry
Proto-West Germanic
*hungrug
Old English
hungriġ
Middle English
hungry
English, today
hungry
From Middle English hungry, from Old English hungriġ, from Proto-West Germanic hungrug, from Proto-Germanic hungrugaz (“hungry”); equivalent to hunger + y. Cognate with West Frisian hongerich (“hungry”), Dutch hongerig (“hungry”), German hungrig (“hungry”), Swedish hungrig (“hungry”), Icelandic hungraður (“hungry”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA