Starvation is extreme suffering or death from having no food. Die of starvation, on the edge of starvation, starvation wages.
Famine is now almost always caused by war or by policy rather than by any absence of food in the world, which is the single most important thing to know about it. Starvation wages is a phrase meaning pay too low to live on.
1nounstarvationExtreme suffering or death from having no food.
“During the siege, many people in the city died of starvation.”
starvation is a suffering.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)terp- — to lose strength, become numb, be motionless
Proto-Germanic
*sterbaną — to become stiff, die
Proto-West Germanic
*sterban
Old English
steorfan — to die, perish
Middle English
sterven — to die, perish
English
starve
English, today
starvation
Built from
From starve + -ation. starve comes 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”), stq 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”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA