Dear experts,
Could anyone tell me what the English word is to describe someone who dies of hungriness, please?
I have searched for idioms/proverbs with dead but there is no relevant data found. I am asking that because I’ve seen ‘shot dead’ on the telly many times and I have even tried with ‘hungry dead’ but it does not work.
Could you please advise if there is a rule to form a word describing a death by combining words or so or we have to learn them by heart?
Thanks a million!
to starve to death
I don’t think you will find any rule.
Some things that would not always kill you can be proceeded by “to death”. Examples of this are “stabbed to death” or “shot to death”. But there are many exceptions: for example “poisoned to death” sounds odd. Other things where a death would be certain, you would seem silly to use “to death”. For example, you would NEVER say “decapitated to death” and probably not “hung to death”. Perhaps you would say “hung until dead” because that implies those doing the hanging will be stopping the process when the result was accomplished.