Other forms: starving, starved, starves
To starve is to suffer or die from having no food. Starve to death, starving people, starved of funds.
Famine is almost never about the absence of food alone — it is about access, and people starve in places where food exists and they cannot reach or afford it. Starved of is the common figurative use, as in starved of attention. The Old English word meant simply to die.
1verbstarveTo suffer or die from having no food.
“Without the aid lorries, thousands of people in the region would have starved.”
starve is a suffering.
Old English steorfan means to die, of any cause. The sense narrowed to death by hunger.
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, today
starve
Built 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”), 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