means The state of suffering or dying from a prolonged lack of food, or by extension being deprived of anything essential.

from A hybrid of the Old English verb 'steorfan,' which simply meant 'to die' (the same root that gives modern German 'sterben,' to die), narrowed over the centuries to mean dying specifically by hunger. The '-ation' ending is Latin, and bolting that classical suffix onto a homely Germanic verb was considered such an odd mongrel that the noun 'starvation' is said to have earned its 18th-century coiner the nickname 'Starvation Dundas.' So the word itself is a small linguistic Frankenstein: an English death stitched to a Roman tail.