starvin' Marvin
1
9.9
- noun
- Slang
- After running for hours, he was feeling like Starvin' Marvin when he finally got to the food stand.
Examples
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Don’t skip breakfast or you’ll be starvin' Marvin by mid-morning!
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Whenever her brothers get home from football practice, they turn into starvin' Marvin at the kitchen table.
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After a day without lunch, I was practically starvin' Marvin by dinnertime.
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Look at him, he's a real starvin' Marvin!
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Whenever I skip breakfast, I feel like a starvin' Marvin by noon.
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Whenever she skips breakfast, she becomes Starvin' Marvin by lunchtime, ready to eat anything in sight.
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He jokingly referred to his friend as Starvin' Marvin because he was always hungry after gym class.
Synonyms
1
9.9
A person who is very thin because they do not get enough food
1
8.6
A person or animal very weak because they have no food
Feeling very hungry and needing food right away
Surface Forms
Morphology
starvin' + Marvin
The meaning is directly built from 'starvin'' (colloquial form of 'starving' = very hungry) combined with a proper name used for a rhyming nickname, so a learner who knows 'starve/starving' and recognizes a name can infer it denotes someone very hungry. The form is a playful, phonological rhyme rather than an idiomatic semantic shift, so despite the colloquial spelling (drop of -g) a B1 learner would generally be able to derive the meaning from the parts.
Etymology
Starvin' Marvin is a playful rhyming nickname made from starvin', the spoken form of 'starving', and the name Marvin. People used the rhyme to make a funny picture of someone who is very hungry, so starvin' Marvin came to mean 'very hungry'.