the great hunger

1. 1.

   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)

   Synonymsthe Irish Faminethe Great Starvationthe Great Calamity

   Broaderfamine

Questions about the great hunger

What does the great hunger mean?

the great hunger means "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)".

What is another word for the great hunger?

Close synonyms include the Irish Famine, the Great Starvation, the Great Calamity. 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 the great hunger a common word?

the great hunger is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.