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What is "starve"

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starve
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
starve
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
bleed/freeze/burn/starve to death
▪ Thousands of people are starving to death.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
out
▪ The Lisbon Government tried to avoid bloodshed by starving out the rebels and blockading the island.
■ NOUN
cash
▪ Local housing authorities have been starved of cash for a number of years by the Government.
death
▪ The entire population had starved to death.
▪ A headline, about anorexia nervosa, starving yourself to death.
▪ Perhaps I would run away, or starve myself to death.
▪ It is, of course, less honest than Spencer and denies that anyone will starve to death.
▪ Recalcitrants were chained, starved and beaten to death.
▪ Would you eat that, unless you were starving to death in a concentration camp? 2.
▪ In the midst of plenty, they were slowly starving to death.
oxygen
▪ Sealing food in an airtight jar starves the bacteria of oxygen and they are unable to reproduce.
▪ Medical theorists suggest that these experiences are actually hallucinations caused by the brain's mood-controlling limbic system being starved of oxygen.
people
▪ On the other hand, we can not stand idly by while people starve in the streets.
▪ This morning, g00 million people awoke starving.
▪ Half our people starving and the other half standing around a roulette wheel.
▪ Of the 800 million people who are starving today, 175 million are children aged under five.
▪ They fear that if the Food Bank goes under, people will starve.
submission
▪ The combined forces of Rufus and Warenne starved Pevensey into submission.
▪ It proposes to starve the people into submission by depriving them of food and necessities of life....
■ VERB
feed
▪ We failed to feed a starving people, leaving millions to die or emigrate.
leave
▪ But the front line runs across Katanga, and the war cut people off from their fields, leaving them to starve.
▪ Instead, the rancher left the horses to starve.
▪ He then went off, leaving his rival to starve to death.
▪ Planting a bomb means saving the children that Madreidetic was leaving to starve.
▪ She says it make her mad that they should be locked away and left to starve.
▪ Perhaps he's going to leave me to starve.
▪ The top breeder who left her sheep to starve.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ In 1884, the crew of Young's ship nearly starved when they were blown off course.
▪ The prisoners were taken out into the desert and left to starve.
▪ The world cannot stand by and watch while these people starve.
▪ Unless these people get food in the next two weeks they will starve to death.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And the ban will stay in place as long as the coastal strip is starved of much needed rain.
▪ Everyone around us was starving too.
▪ I was away in the Army and always starved for news for home.
▪ Reason that is disengaged and tightly regulated would starve other human faculties, they believed.
▪ The entire population had starved to death.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Starve

Starve \Starve\, v. t.

  1. To destroy with cold. [Eng.]

    From beds of raging fire, to starve in ice Their soft ethereal warmth.
    --Milton.

  2. To kill with hunger; as, maliciously to starve a man is, in law, murder.

  3. To distress or subdue by famine; as, to starve a garrison into a surrender.

    Attalus endeavored to starve Italy by stopping their convoy of provisions from Africa.
    --Arbuthnot.

  4. To destroy by want of any kind; as, to starve plants by depriving them of proper light and air.

  5. To deprive of force or vigor; to disable.

    The pens of historians, writing thereof, seemed starved for matter in an age so fruitful of memorable actions.
    --Fuller.

    The powers of their minds are starved by disuse.
    --Locke.

Starve

Starve \Starve\ (st[aum]rv), v. i. [imp. & p. p. Starved (st[aum]rvd); p. pr. & vb. n. Starving.] [OE. sterven to die, AS. steorfan; akin to D. sterven, G. sterben, OHG. sterban, Icel. starf labor, toil.]

  1. To die; to perish. [Obs., except in the sense of perishing with cold or hunger.]
    --Lydgate.

    In hot coals he hath himself raked . . . Thus starved this worthy mighty Hercules.
    --Chaucer.

  2. To perish with hunger; to suffer extreme hunger or want; to be very indigent.

    Sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed.
    --Pope.

  3. To perish or die with cold.
    --Spenser.

    Have I seen the naked starve for cold?
    --Sandys.

    Starving with cold as well as hunger.
    --W. Irving.

    Note: In this sense, still common in England, but rarely used in the United States.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
starve

Old English steorfan "to die" (past tense stearf, past participle storfen), literally "become stiff," from Proto-Germanic *sterban "be stiff" (cognates: Old Frisian sterva, Old Saxon sterban, Dutch sterven, Old High German sterban "to die," Old Norse stjarfi "tetanus"), from PIE root *ster- (1) "stiff, rigid" (see stereo-).\n

\nThe conjugation became weak in English by 16c. The sense narrowed to "die of cold" (14c.); transitive meaning "to kill with hunger" is first recorded 1520s (earlier to starve of hunger, early 12c.). Intransitive sense of "to die of hunger" dates from 1570s. German cognate sterben retains the original sense of the word, but the English has come so far from its origins that starve to death (1910) is now common.

Wiktionary
starve

vb. 1 (context intransitive obsolete English) To die; in later use especially to die slowly, waste away. 2 (context intransitive English) To die because of lack of food or of not eating. 3 (context intransitive English) To be very hungry. 4 (context transitive English) To destroy, make capitulate or at least make suffer by deprivation, notably of food. 5 (context transitive English) To deprive of nourishment. 6 (context transitive British especially Yorkshire and Lancashire English) To kill with cold.

Related phrases:
WordNet
starve

  1. v. be hungry; go without food; "Let's eat--I'm starving!" [syn: hunger, famish] [ant: be full]

  2. die of food deprivation; "The political prisoners starved to death"; "Many famished in the countryside during the drought" [syn: famish]

  3. deprive of food; "They starved the prisoners" [syn: famish] [ant: feed]

  4. have a craving, appetite, or great desire for [syn: crave, hunger, thirst, lust]

  5. deprive of a necessity and cause suffering; "he is starving her of love"; "The engine was starved of fuel"

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "starve".

Most of the immense, ugly structure, which had always looked like the box some other building had been shipped in, was now occupied only by tax accountants, 3V producers, whores, mosquitoes, anthologists, brokers, blimp-race betting agencies, public-relations firms, travel agents, and other telephone-booth Indians, plus hordes and torrents of plague-bearing brown rats and their starving fleas.

Taken in substance it would have starved our species out of existence as soon as it had conceived the theory: our intelligence, whether anthropocentric or otherwise, advises us that we have ensured the survival of terrene species by our actions.

A solo mole person, however, burrowing away at random, was likely to starve long before stumbling across the scattered bounty.

I should have kissed you for that, and wrung the breath out of you afterwards for a starved, misbegotten spawn of an English apothecary--as you are, my son.

Sparks needed her: She imagined him sick or hungry, moneyless, friendless, starving.

The carbon monoxide replaces the oxygen in the bloodstream and starves the brain of the oxygen it needs.

They keep Narwe for slaves, and sometimes us, but without Erani, Narwe would probably starve.

Habana with a famous patronymic, a decent sword, personal honor, ambition, and damned little else save, perhaps, a letter of introduction to some midlevel official, for he and I both came west across the Ocean Sea in just such fashion, knowing that we would sink or swim, live or die, prosper or starve by dint of only our wits, our strong swordarms, and the Will of God.

De government petter leave dem to tie on de pattle field, nur do pring tem here to starve.

Sagebrush and prickly pears furnished the only vegetation, and the rough, broken surface of the country took on a starved, gaunt appearance.

A promoter minus a personalty or a gimmick starved to death, and he was a long way from starving.

I knew the penguins were starving when I went to Antarctica: the phytoplankton extinctions led to the extinction of krill the penguins fed on and there was nothing left for them to eat.

High reared the ploughshare, broken lay the wain, Idly the flax-wheel spun Unridered: starving lords were wasp and moth.

Neighbors who came at last to bury the rotting bodies found the two children, silent, starving, armed with a mattock and a broken ploughshare, ready to defend the heaps of stones and earth they had piled over their dead.

Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their lives upon riches.