Word.ws English Dictionary

hungry rice

hungry rice noun: the cereal Digitaria exilis or white fonio.

Noun

hungry rice (uncountable)

  1. The cereal Digitaria exilis or white fonio.
    • During the French colonial occupation of Mali and Senegal in the late 1800s, Europeans dubbed fonio “hungry rice”, believing it to be an inferior famine food. […][2023 July 6, Maria C. Hunt, “Could an ancient, climate-friendly crop be the future of beer?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Origin of hungry rice

So called by Europeans because it was mistakenly believed to be a famine food in West Africa.

Questions about hungry rice

What does hungry rice mean?
Hungry rice means the cereal Digitaria exilis or white fonio.
What part of speech is hungry rice?
Hungry rice is a noun.

Words near hungry rice in the dictionary

  1. hungry ghost
  2. Hungry Ghost Festival
  3. hungry ghosts
  4. hungry grass
  5. hungry like the wolf
  6. hungry rice
  7. Hungry Thirties
  8. Hungryalism
  9. Hungryalist
  10. Hungryalists
  11. Hungs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hungry rice (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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