the Great Hunger
- noun
:
la Gran Hambruna
- The historical accounts of the Great Hunger reveal the devastating impact of the potato blight on Irish society.
Examples
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One is that the English focus of the book put Irish writing outside its field of reference, so that Kavanagh's The Great Hunger, which Heaney here labels "anti-pastoral," is not included to supplement the sense created by the editors that pastoral poetry had simply lost its validity and force sometime in the nineteenth century.
Academic text (2007) -
The Great Hunger of '47.
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One is that the English focus of the book put Irish writing outside its field of reference, so that Kavanagh's The Great Hunger, which Heaney here labels "anti-pastoral," is not included to supplement the sense created by the editors that pastoral poetry had simply lost its validity and force sometime in the nineteenth century.
Academic text (2007) -
The Great Hunger led to a significant decline in Ireland's population due to starvation and emigration.
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Many families struggled to survive during the Great Hunger, which caused widespread suffering across the country.
Synonyms
95
4.8
A very large shortage of food that causes many people to starve
83
4.7
A very strong hunger that happens when someone has no food for a long time
1
6.1
A time in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 when a potato disease made many people starve and leave the country
A period of mass hunger in Ireland from 1846 to 1851 that causes many people to leave
A severe famine in Ireland from 1846 to 1851 that killed about one million people
Surface Forms
Morphology
The combination 'great' + 'hunger' transparently conveys the general idea of a very severe famine, so a B1 learner who knows the words would likely infer a large-scale lack of food. However, the capitalized phrase 'the Great Hunger' is a proper name for a specific historical event (the Irish famine of 1846–1851), and that particular referent requires factual or cultural knowledge beyond the constituent meanings.
Etymology
The Great Hunger refers to the terrible famine in Ireland from 1846 to 1851, when a potato disease left many people without food and made many families leave the country. Because of that awful scene, the word hunger here means 'a very bad famine', and the name now stands for that historical event.