What does famished mean?
Famished means extremely hungry — far beyond ordinary hunger, to the point of feeling weak, desperate, or single-mindedly focused on food. The word is the past participle of the verb 'to famish', which historically meant to starve or cause to starve. Today it is used almost entirely in everyday speech as a vivid, emphatic way of saying one is hungry: after a long day of work, a strenuous workout, or a skipped meal, someone might exclaim that they are absolutely famished. It carries a slightly dramatic, informal tone, often deployed for comic exaggeration rather than to describe genuine starvation. Its closest synonyms are 'ravenous' and 'starving'. Derived from Latin via Old French, it shares its ancestry with 'famine', making its figurative lineage apt: to be famished is, etymologically speaking, to feel the pangs of famine on a personal scale.
adjectiveExtremely hungry; suffering from or affected by intense hunger.
- Extremely hungry; having an intense need to eat (the dominant sense, typically used predicatively after verbs like 'be', 'feel', 'look').
- Affected by starvation or deprivation of food (a rarer, more literal sense).
"After the twelve-hour hike, we were absolutely famished and devoured everything in sight."
"I skipped lunch and by dinnertime I was utterly famished."
"The rescued climbers, famished after days stranded on the mountain, could barely speak."
'Famished' comes from the same Latin root as 'famine' — so when you say you're famished, you're technically claiming to be starving like a famine victim.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of famished
'Famished' derives from the verb 'famish', which came into English from the Old French 'afamer', itself rooted in the Vulgar Latin verb 'affamare', meaning to bring to hunger or starvation. That verb was formed from Latin 'fames', the word for hunger or famine, which also gives English 'famine'. In Middle English, 'famish' carried a strong literal sense — to starve or perish from lack of food — and over time the past participle softened into today's everyday expression of intense hunger. Cognates appear in other Romance languages, such as French 'affamé', meaning hungry or starving.
Related word forms
How famished is actually used
Informal to neutral register; very common in everyday speech as an emphatic alternative to 'hungry'. Often intensified with modifiers like 'absolutely', 'utterly', or 'half'. It functions almost exclusively as a predicate adjective ('we were famished') rather than attributively ('famished people' is rare).
Easily confused with famished
'Finished' means completed or ended, while 'famished' means extremely hungry — the two share a superficial sound resemblance but nothing else.