famine

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English famine, also famyn,^[2][3] borrowed from Old French famine (“hunger”),^[3][4][5][6] from Vulgar Latin *famīna,^[4][7][8] which Barnhart calls Gallo-Romance,^[3] from Latin famēs (“hunger”).^[4][3][9][5] The Old French word was formed from faim (“hunger”), the descendant of the Latin noun, with a suffix that Klein takes as representing Latin -īna.^[6][10][7] The Anglo-Norman famine is recorded from 1141, with the senses "lack of food, starvation" and "longing".^[11] The Latin word is of unknown origin,^[4][3] or of uncertain origin according to Klein.^[7] famish comes from the same Latin noun by another route.^[9]

Earliest recorded meaning

Extreme and general scarcity of food in a town or country: 1362, in William Langland's Piers Plowman,^[5] before 1376 according to Barnhart, also in Piers Plowman.^[3] Etymonline dates it to the mid-14th century.^[4]

Semantic evolution

From the start the word covered both a general dearth of food and a person's own lack of food: Chaucer (c. 1405) and Gower used it for hunger and starvation,^[5][2] and Gower in 1393 also for a violent appetite, chiefly in figurative use.^[5] Chaucer used it three times and Gower four.^[12] In 1610 the word was first personified.^[5] The King James Bible of 1611 extended it to a scarcity of anything other than food, in a verse of Amos.^[5] Johnson (1755) defined it as "scarcity of food; dearth; distress for want of victuals", quoting Macbeth: "Till famine and the ague eat them up".^[13] The personal senses, hunger and ravenous appetite, are now archaic or rare.^[14][10] A verb famine, to starve, was used from 1520 to the end of the 16th century.^[5]

Timeline

• 1362 – extreme and general scarcity of food.^[5]
• 1393 – a violent appetite, chiefly figurative.^[5]
• c. 1405 – want of food, hunger, starvation.^[5]
• 1520 – verb, to starve (obsolete by the 1590s).^[5]
• 1610 – personified.^[5]
• 1611 – an extreme scarcity of something.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. A severe shortage of food over a wide area, often lasting a long time, as after crop failure or war: The drought brought famine to the region.^[15][14][5]
2. An extreme scarcity of anything: a famine of affordable housing.^[15][14][5]
3. (archaic) Lack of food; extreme hunger or starvation.^[14][10]
4. (archaic) A ravenous appetite.^[14][10][15]

Related words

• famish

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b c d e f Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
7. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
8. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
10. ^ a b c d Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–)
12. ^ Benson, Larry D., Glossarial Concordance to Middle English (Chaucer, Gower), Johns Hopkins University, github.com/jhu-digital-manuscripts/gcme
13. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
15. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins