to be hungry: to feel the bodily need for food, and so to crave something as intensely as a starving person craves a meal
At its core the word names one of the plainest human experiences: the pang of needing food. It is what Jesus felt after forty days without eating, what drove David and his men to eat the consecrated bread, what sent the disciples through the grainfields plucking heads of wheat, and what Paul endured in the hardships of his mission.
Because hunger is among the most driving of all human wants, the word also reaches beyond the stomach to picture intense longing. In the Sermon on the Mount, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness want to be right with God the way a starving person wants bread. In John, Jesus promises that whoever comes to him will never hunger again, using a physical image for a deeper kind of satisfaction.
Scripture often makes literal hunger a marker of who God cares for and how he overturns fortunes: he fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty, and in the end the redeemed will hunger no more. Whether the need is physical or figurative, the word always carries the ache of a real lack that is waiting to be filled.