Starved to mean cold

[stopmefeelingsick]

Anyone knowledgeable about the origins of the English language know if this is a regional thing?

Growing up I remember my Grandmother coming in on a cold day and saying she was starved. She meant with cold but I'd grown up (as did everyone else I knew) knowing starved meaning hungry.

Anyone else heard it said meaning this?

Where are you from? I’m up in Cumbria and a lot of the older people use it to mean cold here too.

I think it is a regional thing, as I never heard it in childhood, (South East) apart from in books.

It's mentioned in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' - Orwell quotes someone as saying they were 'starving' and puts brackets afterwards to indicate they mean [freezing]. It was published in 1937. I've never heard it from any contemporary source, or, indeed in real life, but Orwell spent time lodging with working class northern folk so I assume he must have heard it often enough to have deciphered it.

It was used where I grew up to mean cold. I couldn't grasp why there were cold children in Africa.

People up here also say it’s “starvation” outside of its particularly cold. I always summed it was because when you are literally starving you tend to be colder but I’m sure someone smarter than me will be along with an answer.

I'm from the south / West Country but my grandmother was from the midlands.

It’s in Jane Eyre - in the Lowood bit she talks about how the younger girls wrapped their pinafores around their starved arms, while the bigger girls got the places near the (meagre) fire.

I've heard it in Scotland as 'starved of heat'

Ah that makes more sense!

Ah! Thank you. I've always read that as 'starved' meaning they were thin arms because they were kept so short of food, but your interpretation makes far more sense.

I'm from Yorkshire and moved about quite a lot as a child. I've never heard it being used to mean cold.

Bristolians say they're "Shrammed" to mean cold.

I think it used to mean ‘to die’.

I'm sure I've heard it as 'I'm starved with cold', it rings a bell. I grew up in England but in pretty much exclusively Irish community. Can't fully place it but definitely sounds familiar.

My father was Irish and used to say that it was 'starvation out there', when it was very cold.

It was common in Lincolnshire when I was young

I'm in NE Scotland and we'd say "It's starvation" if we came in on a really cold day.

Yup. Starved was definitely a word I remember being used. My dad was from Blackburn and I guessed it was from there. It meant cold right down to the marrow

Heard it regularly used in Co Antrim

Heard people say it in Lancashire in the past. Not so much in recent times z

West Yorkshire here, my grandad used to say it was starving cold

My Yorkshire-born grandmother, born 1880, used it to mean being cold. She had a bit of a cross-purposes conversation with a daughter-in-law who came from the south of England and understood it to mean being hungry. I'm in between and I was told the story of their conversation so long ago that I just accept it can mean either.

second it used to be common in Lincolnshire, not so common now

Is it something to do with times when food was short because of blights etc, and people knew food created body heat and if you didn't eat in cold weather you were more at risk of freezing/hypothermia? In lancashire they used to talk about feeding th'ole wi wood (putting logs on the fire) so I suspect in certain parts of the country there has traditionally been a linguistic link between heat and food. (One of my dad's sisters married a man from Oldham.)

I think it just means 'deprived of'. We say 'starved of affection/love', for example.