famine: [14] Both famine and famish [14] come ultimately from Latin famēs ‘hunger’. Its Vulgar Latin derivative *faminis produced Old French famine, source of English famine. Famish has come via a more circuitous route: another Vulgar Latin derivative of famēs was *affamāre, a compound verb formed with the prefix ad- ‘towards’; in Old French this became afamer, which was borrowed into Middle English, with loss of its first syllable, as fame ‘starve’; and before long this had the suffix -ish added to it, on the model of other verbs such as abolish and diminish. => famish
