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?

Definitely in Co Antrim. It would starve you (to death) out there. I’m starving. I always thought of it as sort of drawn in and withered, but starved of warmth makes sense too.

Brought up in Manchester then Stockport, and yes, starving meant freezing cold, as well as hungry. DM, who was born 100 ago, always used to say this.

Never heard 'starving' meaning cold. (Midlands.)

The Cambridge dictionary (like all others) says very hungry, but also says it can mean 'cold.' Odd, as I have never heard of the word being used to say you're cold. Seems to be More Scottish/Northern English.

STARVING | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

No, you've got the wrong end of the stick there. It's nothing to do with temperature.

If you have a cold, then it does you good to feed yourself up, and it will make you feel better. If you've got the flu (or some other fever) then you feel too ill to be able to eat much at all, and if you try it only makes you feel worse. Your body is too busy fighting bugs to be able to digest it.

Feed a cold, starve a fever. There you go.

@cunningartificer Thank you so much for your explanation! I find this stuff fascinating.

My Grandfather, born in Bristol in the 1890s spoke broad Bristolian dialect and much of it clearly harked back to much earlier times.

My parents were from Blackburn and I heard it a lot there

So interesting, thanks.

@cunningartificer is correct, and you see the connection still in the German sterben and the Dutch sterven, both meaning ‘to die’. Apparently ‘to starve’ in 14th century English meant ‘to die of cold’, before it took on the meaning of dying of hunger a century or so later.

I'm in my fifties and was brought up in NI where this was fairly common usage until I left in the 90s. Pretty sure my mum still says it.

They have quite a lot of archaic vocab in NI though. My mum still says she is redding up, meaning tidying up. My Old English lecturer at Uni told me it was an Old Norse word!

Yes @fluffiphlox you're right.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/starve#English

Nothing to add to these knowledgeable replies - but didn't Cathy say it in Wuthering Heights? I seem to remember her telling someone to shut the door because she was starved.

I'm Irish and my Dad used the strangest words for things sometimes. We would laugh at him, including my Mum and tell him he made up his own words.

I started watching Outlander and started seeing that a lot of the Gaelic used, were some of the words my Dad used. I wish he was alive, so I could tell him that we were the fools to be laughing at him.

Cumbrian- definitely used here.

It's because if you're starving you're cold.

It was common when I was growing up in West Yorkshire . " I'm starved / starving" - very cold, or " he's a starved 'un" someone who feels cold easily. It wouldn't be used for just a bit cold.
No idea if it's still used there now but I say it occasionally.

I've lived in the West Midlands for a long time and have never heard it here.