FAMINE
Dictionary entry overview: What does famine mean?
• FAMINE (noun)
The noun FAMINE has 2 senses:
1. an acute insufficiency
2. a severe shortage of food (as through crop failure) resulting in violent hunger and starvation and death
Familiarity information: FAMINE used as a noun is rare.
Dictionary entry details
• FAMINE (noun)
Meaning:
An acute insufficiency
Classified under:
Nouns denoting stable states of affairs
Synonyms:
dearth; famine; shortage
Hypernyms ("famine" is a kind of...):
deficiency; lack; want (the state of needing something that is absent or unavailable)
Meaning:
A severe shortage of food (as through crop failure) resulting in violent hunger and starvation and death
Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural events
Hypernyms ("famine" is a kind of...):
calamity; cataclysm; catastrophe; disaster; tragedy (an event resulting in great loss and misfortune)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "famine"):
the Great Calamity; the Great Hunger; the Great Starvation; the Irish Famine (a famine in Ireland resulting from a potato blight; between 1846 and 1851 a million people starved to death and 1.6 million emigrated (most to America))
