I am looking for an English word that may or may not exist.
My wife claims said word does not exist. But she originally hails from New Jersey, so her credibility as a native English speaker is limited.
Specifically, I am looking for the equivalent word for “starve”, except for water.
You can “starve to death”, so that’s dying from lack of food.
Heck, you can “choke”, “asphyxiate”, and “suffocate” to death, so English has at least three singular words that capture the idea of dying from lack of air.
Water, being the final leg of the three essentials (and perhaps more essential than food) seems to lack the singular word.
You do not “thirst to death”, do you? “Thirst” is more akin to “hunger”, which lacks the death part of the need for one of the three essentials.
Sure you can “die of thirst,” like you can “die of hunger”, but that’s not the one-word equivalent of “starve”.
It strikes me as a bizarre omission in the language.
(And no, I don’t want the Latin doctor terms my doctor wife also threw at me. That’s just over-educated New Jersey speak.)
Desiccation would be the closest single word that comes to mind, although I’ve never heard it used to describe dying from thirst. Death by desiccation has a nice ring to it though.
Or if someone did something really bad their punishment would be to be staked to the ground and exsiccated by the elements and eviscerated by buzzards.
