famine

1. 1.

   an acute insufficiency

   Synonymsdearthshortage

   Broaderlack
2. 2.

   a severe shortage of food (as through crop failure) resulting in violent hunger and starvation and death

   Broadercalamity

   Narrowerthe Irish Famine

Other forms of famine

plural

famines·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about famine

What does famine mean?

famine means "an acute insufficiency". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in famine?

famine has 2 syllables: fam-ine. The stress falls on "fam". In IPA it is /ˈfæmən/.

What is another word for famine?

Close synonyms include dearth, shortage. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is famine a common word?

famine is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.