Word.ws English Dictionary

hanker

/ˈhæŋkə(ɹ)/

hanker verb: to crave, want or desire.

Verb

hanker (third-person singular simple present hankers, present participle hankering, simple past and past participle hankered)

  1. To crave, want or desire.
    • If you hanker for chocolate, you'll like this fudge recipe.
    • “O ’tis true enough, faith. I cannot understand Farmer Boldwood being such a fool at his time of life as to ho and hanker after thik^([sic]) woman in the way ’a do, and she not care a bit about en.”1874, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], →OCLC, page 289
    Synonyms:
    covet

hanker meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada

hanker in Urdu

چاہنا, دلی آرزو ہونا, پھڑکنا

hanker in Bengali

লালন করা, তৃষ্ণা করা

hanker in Malayalam

കൊതിക്കുക, അതിയായി ആശിക്കുക അഭിലഷിക്കുക

hanker in Kannada

ಹಂಬಲಿಸು, ಹಾತೊರೆ, ಕಾತರಿಸು, ಹಪಹಪಿಸು

Examples of hanker in a sentence

  • “Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a hungry man to hanker after.”1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym] (Samuel L[anghorne] Clemens), chapter XXII, in A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing...
  • I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself.1889, Jerome K. Jerome, chapter 7, in Three Men in a Boat […] :
  • […] it made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had always been hankering to be.1894, Mark Twain, chapter 1, in Tom Sawyer Abroad:
  • […] the newly rich hanker after old aristocratic glitz.2012 October 13, “Very good, sir”, in The Economist, →ISSN, archived from the original on 12 Jan 2025:

All 12 example sentences with hanker

Synonyms of hanker

Forms of hanker

third-person singular presenthankers
present participlehankering
past participlehankered
pasthankered

Origin of hanker

With a secondary frequentative suffix -er, ultimately pointing to Proto-Germanic *hankōną, an iterative to *hanhaną (“to hang”). Related to Dutch hunkeren (“to crave”), which continues the zero-grade iterative.

Words formed from hanker

Words that rhyme with hanker

6 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about hanker

What does hanker mean?
Hanker means to crave, want or desire.
What is hanker in Urdu?
Hanker in Urdu is چاہنا, دلی آرزو ہونا, پھڑکنا. See Hanker meaning in Urdu.
How do you use hanker in a sentence?
“Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a hungry man to hanker after.”
What part of speech is hanker?
Hanker is a verb.
How do you pronounce hanker?
Hanker is pronounced /ˈhæŋkə(ɹ)/.
What is the past tense of hanker?
The past tense of hanker is hankered.

Words near hanker in the dictionary

  1. Hankel functions
  2. Hankel matrices
  3. Hankel matrix
  4. Hankel matrixes
  5. Hankels
  6. hanker
  7. hankerchief
  8. hankerchiefs
  9. hankered
  10. hankerer
  11. hankerers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hanker (page history and authors); hanker (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hanker (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hanker (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hanker (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-hanker.wav.

Cite this entry: “hanker.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hanker. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.