FAMINE

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 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)

Sense 1

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)

Sense 2

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))

 Context examples 

Young life had little chance in such a famine.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been trained by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious appetites.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

That was the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

And under the sun there is never famine.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

Famine for food, expectation for content.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

From this time Felix was more employed, and the heart-moving indications of impending famine disappeared.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

It found that dietary changes, improved farm management, and waste reduction will be necessary to avoid famine and farmland depletion in the future.

(Model shows pathway to feeding the world, SciDev.Net)

At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Under the stress of famine or of conquest they have made their way up here.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

GM potatoes are also resistant to late blight disease which caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s and which continues to threaten potato crops worldwide.

(GM tech expands with more crops to more countries, SciDev.Net)