peckish adjective (informal, chiefly British)

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary — "slightly hungry"

Collins English Dictionary — "feeling slightly hungry; having an appetite. Used informally, chiefly in British English."

Oxford English Dictionary — earliest documented use 1714 (A. Smith); three listed meanings, one of which is now obsolete.

Merriam-Webster — "somewhat hungry; also: cross, ill-natured"

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WORD ORIGIN

The word dates back at least to 1714, when it turns up in a British text — though it almost certainly circulated in speech well before anyone bothered to write it down. Etymonline places the first recorded adjectival use at 1785, describing it as "disposed to peck." The root is the verb to peck — what a bird does when it dips its beak repeatedly at seeds or crumbs — which by the 1540s had acquired the secondary meaning of to eat, particularly in thieves' cant, where peck was slang for food. Add the suffix -ish (meaning "having a tendency towards"), and you get peckish: inclined to peck at something, i.e., ready for a nibble. It is a notably precise word: not hungry, not ravenous, not famished — just at that pleasant, mild stage where the thought of a biscuit or a piece of cheese becomes suddenly very appealing. P.G. Wodehouse, who understood hunger as well as he understood butlers, put it perfectly in 1936: "Peckish is not the word. I felt like a homeless tapeworm." Interestingly, peckish carries a second, older meaning — irritable, cross, out of sorts — which survives in some American regional dialects and which makes a kind of psychological sense: a person who hasn't eaten recently is rarely at their most charming. The word also appeared in a Monty Python sketch (the famous Cheese Shop, 1972), which tells you something about the kind of company it keeps.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

a bit hungry, appetite, craving, famished (stronger), feeling hollow, gnawing hunger, hungry, in need of a snack, in need of sustenance, light hunger, munchies (informal), needing a bite, nibblish (rare), nibbly, on the hunt for a snack, peakish (dialectal variant), ready for a bite, sharp-set (archaic, formal), slightly hungry, snackish (informal AmE), stomach growling, with an appetite, with a hollow feeling

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"Skipping lunch, I generally get PECKISH around 15:00."

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