It’s rare that I encounter a word in the English language that I have never seen before. But this week, as I was planning my lecture for a first-year composition class at the University of Arizona, I encountered one: famelicose, meaning “hungry all the time.”
Even though I hadn’t seen the word before, I had a hunch what it meant, since I am familiar with the word bellicose. That word has proven itself a useful descriptor for our moment. Public language feels bellicose, doesn’t it? Louder, sharper, less interested in listening than in winning.
Every Friday, I introduce my students to an obscure F-word. My students love F-word Fridays, a time in which they’ve also learned fecund (fruitful), fatuous (lacking intelligence), and fantod (a state of irritability and tension). I ask them to write one or two sentences using the word, and since the Oxford English Dictionary notes that famelicose last appeared in print in the 1700s (not counting blogs and “obsolete words” lists), I enlisted my students to help me change that. They are future engineers, artists, doctors, and teachers. With their permission, I’ve copied their sentences below:
The famelicose students rushed the student union for lunch.
I was always jealous of my famelicose brother, since he could eat abundances of food without getting chunky.
After the marathon, my friend was absolutely famelicose, so we ate a huge meal.
I scrolled for an hour on my phone before admitting I was famelicose.
The famelicose lion bared his teeth and looked at me with no remorse once I accidentally fell into his den.
Living with food enthusiasts means everyone is in a constant state of being famelicose.
The famelicose stray cat hovered near the café, ribs visible beneath its matted fur.
I now know why they say people are “as hungry as a horse”, because after getting a horse I can see that they’re the most famelicose beings of all!
The famelicose fraternity brothers practically doubled their monthly food bill.
My cat in the morning is so famelicose and screams at my door until he gets fed.
Having a famelicose grandfather means that all the cookies disappear.
The puppy eagerly pushed through the rest of his littermates to get to the food; the runt of the litter, it turned out, was famelicose.
He had a famelicose desire for power, one that could not be satiated, even by titles and wealth.
Reading these sentences, I was struck by how easily hunger travels. It moves from dogs to brothers to fraternity houses, then to lions and power itself. Hunger is physical, yes–but it is also rhetorical. Political. Cultural. We live in a moment defined by appetites that refuse to be satisfied, by leaders who are famelicose for attention, control, spectacle.
Maybe that’s why this old word still fits. Maybe it never really went away. All my students did was remind me that hunger–named or unnamed–has always been with us.
What I love most about their sentences is not their polish, but their generosity. My students took a word that had been sleeping for centuries and put it back to work without irony, without judgment, without fear. I told them to email me their sentences, but because of space constraints, they would not be named when I wrote this piece. The lack of recognition didn’t deter them. We should all take a lesson from that.
In a moment when so much public language feels weaponized, inflated, or deliberately starved of truth, there is something quietly radical about this practice. Teaching a word. Trying it out. Seeing what it can hold. If we are famelicose for anything right now, perhaps it’s not food at all, but language that still knows how to mean.