Synonyms:
famine
Meaning: a severe shortage of food (as through crop failure) resulting in violent hunger and starvation and death
Synonyms:
dearth, famine, shortage
Meaning: an acute insufficiency
Usage examples
Avoid pecuniary obligation as you would pestilence or famine.
The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins.
But the famine of 1847 broke up those schools, and in a very few years they nearly all disappeared.
The alternative was dreadful, as famine presented them on the one hand, and shipwreck on the other.
Iroquois bullets and tomahawks had killed the Hurons by hundreds, but famine and disease had killed incomparably more.
Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities in China, because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its train.
They took a small Spanish vessel off the coast of Cuba, but were soon compelled by famine to put into Havana and give themselves up.
Was it battle and massacre that ended that long afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine?
The Admiral, upon hearing this lamentable tale, changed the name of Philippeville into that of Port Famine, under which appellation the place is known at the present day.
In times of famine, the adults often denied themselves in order to make the food last as long as possible for the children, who were not able to bear hunger as well as the old.