A severe shortage (especially a shortage of food)

Usage examples of famine.

When the return of famine severely admonished them of the importance of the arts, the national distress was sometimes alleviated by the emigration of a third, perhaps, or a fourth part of their youth.

Women and children were imbued with a spirit equal to that of the men, fought as stoutly on the walls, and died as uncomplainingly from famine in the beleaguered towns.

The memorable benefaction of the year 508, which was a famine reinforced by a pestilence, swept away sixteen hundred millions of people in nine months.

I am aiming to raise 6 cwt of potatoes against the famine I foresee next winter.

PURGANAX: Gentlemen Boars, I move a resolution, That her most sacred Majesty should be Invited to attend the feast of Famine, And to receive upon her chaste white body Dews of Apotheosis from this BAG.

As he watched the figure in its restless sleep, looking for all the world like some peasant victim of a Russian famine, he could not refrain from smiling, for he remembered that this was Jim Falconet, who had once captained a famous polo team on their visit to England, and was believed to be the third or fourth richest man in the world.

The talk at Gaillard was of battles and hostages, taxes and levies, of ransom, of the famine and hard times that war had brought to the provinces of the Angevins, and, more than all, of the persistent treachery and menace of the Franks As the castle uplifted its mass against the sky, Plantagenet policy with respect to this menace took shape and became mamfest.

James de Guider assisted his brother Stephen into the court--the first time the lame old gentleman had been in Templetown since the famine.

Their relative Patrick de Guider was there, the sole survivor of the fourteen brothers who had died of famine fever contracted from the stir about line of Connemara migrants.

His chum laughed, and he repeated the remark that not one miner in a thousand could live upon half-a-crown a day in those times, when for the commonest necessaries famine prices had frequently to be paid.

There was no way to connect the plagues and sickness and famines to events occurring in Rome and Maam Cross, Ireland, but all my instincts told me there had to be a link, and that we would soon know what it was.

He had bought up all the potatoes that had flourished unbhighted in the Maharees in Kerry during the famine.

As yet the mind alone had suffered--could I for ever put off the time, when the delicate frame and shrinking nerves of my child of prosperity, the nursling of rank and wealth, who was my companion, should be invaded by famine, hardship, and disease?

The first cholera epidemic found her in the throes not only of famine but of civil disorder, controlled and suppressed by her highly mechanized army and by the still very powerful habits of orderliness and subordination in her people.

The green-wood glade, the cultivated fields, noble castles, and smiling villages were changed to churchyard and tomb: want, famine and hate ravaged the fated land.