tense 1 |tens|
adjective
(esp. of a muscle or someone’s body) stretched tight or rigid : she tried to relax her tense muscles.
• (of a person) unable to relax because of nervousness, anxiety, or stimulation : he was tense with excitement.
• (of a situation, event, etc.) causing or showing anxiety and nervousness : relations between the two neighboring states had been tense in recent years.
• Phonetics (of a speech sound, esp. a vowel) pronounced with the vocal muscles stretched tight. The opposite of lax .

verb [ intrans. ]
become tense, typically through anxiety or nervousness : her body tensed up.
• [ trans. ] make (a muscle or one’s body) tight or rigid : carefully stretch and then tense your muscles.

DERIVATIVES
tensely adverb
tenseness noun

tensity |ˈtensitē|
noun ( dated).
ORIGIN late 17th cent. : from Latin tensus ‘stretched,’ from the verb tendere.

&

starve |stärv| verb [ intrans. ]
1 (of a person or animal) suffer severely or die from hunger : she left her animals to starve | seven million starved to death | [as adj. ] ( starving) the world’s starving children.
• [ trans. ] cause (a person or animal) to suffer severely or die from hunger : for a while she had considered starving herself.
• ( be starving or starved) informal feel very hungry : I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.
• ( starve someone out or into) force someone out of a place or into a specified state by stopping supplies of food : the Royalists were starved out after eleven days | German U-boats hoping to starve Britain into submission.
• [ trans. ] (usu. be starved of or for) deprive of something necessary : the arts are being starved of funds.
2 archaic be freezing cold : pull down that window for we are perfectly starving here.
DERIVATIVES
starvation |-ˈvā sh ən| noun ORIGIN Old English steorfan [to die,] of Germanic origin, probably from a base meaning ‘be rigid’ (compare with stare ); related to Dutch sterven and German sterben.

Thesaurus
starving
adjective
the world’s starving children dying of hunger,
deprived of food, undernourished, malnourished, starved, half-starved; very hungry, ravenous, famished, empty, hollow; fasting. antonym full.


Quoted from Oxford Dictionary