Word.ws English Dictionary

hungry gap

hungry gap noun: the interval in early spring (approximately from March to May in the Northern Hemisphere) during which the remaining stores of the previous year’s winter vegetables are depleted, yet the forthcoming season’s summer crops have not yet reached harvest maturity, resulting in a temporary scarcity of fresh food resources.

Noun

hungry gap (plural hungry gaps)

  1. The interval in early spring (approximately from March to May in the Northern Hemisphere) during which the remaining stores of the previous year’s winter vegetables are depleted, yet the forthcoming season’s summer crops have not yet reached harvest maturity, resulting in a temporary scarcity of fresh food resources.
    • At the very end of the Middle Ages, Breughel depicted country folk wrapped up in fits of mass hysteria, and the historical accounts of these rural frenzies have explained the delirium in terms of the slender diet on which the poor had to subsist during the hungry gap.1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 102

Forms of hungry gap

pluralhungry gaps

Questions about hungry gap

What does hungry gap mean?
Hungry gap means the interval in early spring (approximately from March to May in the Northern Hemisphere) during which the remaining stores of the previous year’s winter vegetables are depleted, yet the forthcoming season’s summer crops have not yet reached harvest maturity, resulting in a temporary scarcity of fresh food resources.
What part of speech is hungry gap?
Hungry gap is a noun.
What is the plural of hungry gap?
The plural of hungry gap is hungry gaps.

Words near hungry gap in the dictionary

  1. hungriness
  2. hungrisome
  3. hungry
  4. hungry as a hog
  5. Hungry Forties
  6. hungry gap
  7. hungry gaps
  8. hungry ghost
  9. Hungry Ghost Festival
  10. hungry ghosts
  11. hungry grass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hungry gap (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.

Last updated:

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