inanition

1. (medicine) A state of advanced lack of adequate nutrition, food, or water or a physiological inability to utilize them, with resulting weakness.Examples: "It may be reasonably inferred that our baby will first expire of inanition, as being the frailest member of our circle; and that our twins will follow next in order."; "The Diet of the street-children is in some cases an alternation of surfeit and inanition [...]"; "1955, Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles (translators), Molloy by Samuel Beckett, Part I, in Three Novels, New York: Grove, 1959, p. 202, And I who a fortnight before would joyfully have reckoned how long I could survive on the provisions that remained, probably with reference to the question of calories and vitamins, and established in my head a series of menus asymptotically approaching nutritional zero, was now content to note feebly that I should soon be dead of inanition."Synonyms: starvation, cachexiacountableuncountable

2. (philosophy) A spiritual emptiness or lack of purpose or will to live, akin to nausea in existentialist philosophy.Examples: "There bending over her, with eyes bathed in tears, she watched the progress of her beloved Rosilia's melancholy disorder; she beheld her, pale, exhausted, either in listless inanition, or haunted with the dreadful idea that mental derangement or death would terminate her sufferings!"; "I had forced into his hand the means to carry on decently the serious business of life, to get food, drink, and shelter of the customary kind while his wounded spirit, like a bird with a broken wing, might hop and flutter into some hole, to die quietly of inanition there."; ""Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday evenings, when the whole of New York is dying of inanition.""countableuncountable