starvation - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Proto-Indo-European *-tis

Proto-Indo-European *-tiHō

English starvation

From starve + -ation.

starvation (countable and uncountable, plural starvations)

  1. A condition of severe suffering due to a lack of nutrition.
    Synonym: inanition
    • 1918 September–November, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Land That Time Forgot”, in The Blue Book Magazine, Chicago, Ill.: Story-press Corp., →OCLC; republished as chapter IV, in Hugo Gernsback, editor, Amazing Stories, part I, number 11, New York, N.Y.: Experimenter Publishing, February 1927, →OCLC, book I, page 997:
      "We haven't one chance for life in a hundred thousand if we don't find food and water upon Caprona. This water coming out of the cliff is not salt; but neither is it fit to drink, though each of us has drunk. It is fair to assume that inland the river is fed by pure streams, that there are fruits and herbs and game. Shall we lie out here and die of thirst and starvation with a land of plenty possibly only a few hundred yards away? We have the means for navigating a subterranean river. Are we too cowardly to utilize this means?"
    • 2025 May 20, Dina Kraft, “Goals of Israel’s renewed Gaza offensive are unclear, even to Israelis”, in The Christian Science Monitor:
      Meanwhile, Mr. Netanyahu’s orders to resume delivery of food aid, an abrupt about-face under intense U.S. and international pressure, came as warnings of mass starvation intensify, including from within Israel’s own security establishment.
  2. (figurative) Severe shortage of resources.
    • 1963 February, “Diesel locomotive faults and their remedies”, in Modern Railways, page 99:
      Fuel starvation has several causes.
    • 2002, Allan N. Packer, Configuring and Tuning Databases on the Solaris Platform, page 362:
      However, if the ASE application is paged out because of memory starvation, the entire process is blocked and no useful work can be done until the required pages are brought into memory.
  3. (computer science) A state where a process is perpetually denied necessary resources to process its work.
    • 2004, Scott Oaks, Henry Wong, Java Threads, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 138:
      Whenever multiple threads compete for a scarce resource, there is the danger of starvation, a situation in which the thread never gets the resource.

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