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This question popped up in my mind when I read following text from a Textbook of Medical Physiology, Guyton and Hall:

The amount of food that a person ingests is determined principally by an intrinsic desire for food called hunger. The type of food that a person preferentially seeks is determined by appetite.

This text shows hunger is general term for desire to eat anything, whereas appetite is used to prefer specific food to eat. However I have seen people using these terms interchangeably, such as:

Poor appetite? What that can mean and how to get hungry again. Washington Post report

At first part of the headline, it says "poor appetite?" but it ends up suggesting on "how to get hungry again" rather than saying how to revive appetite or how to improve appetite. Can I say appetite is a hunger and vice versa?

It seems to me both are psychological or physiological desires to eat, or one is physiological and the other is psychological (not sure which one is).

Interestingly, most of the dictionaries do not indicate the specificity of the feeling of a need to eat.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, the word appetite denotes:

a desire or need for something, esp. food: a good/healthy appetite an appetite for adventure

According to Oxford Learners Dictionaries, the word hunger denotes:

the feeling caused by a need to eat If you feel hunger pangs between meals, eat some fruit or nuts. I felt faint with hunger.

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Hunger focuses on the feeling of lacking something the body needs, while appetite focuses on the amount that someone is prepared to consume. If you say someone has "a good appetite", you mean that they are eating enough food; if they have "a huge appetite" they are probably eating too much. But if you say they are "very hungry" your first thought is that they have not eaten in a long time and are really looking forward to that first bite. They both involve a desire to consume food (and both can be metaphorically extended to other things), but one is about lack, and the other about capacity.

Because the difference is one of focus, you can indeed often substitute one word for the other. In the "how to get hungry again" example, the writer was partly seeking variety in prose and partly recognizing that someone worried about their appetite might actually want to feel hungry, while most people think of hunger as not pleasant.

Another difference in emphasis: hunger is usually a time-specific state of a person. I'm hungry now, but I won't be after I've eaten. Appetite, by contrast, is often (but not exclusively) used for a somewhat stable trait of a person. If your kid always eats a lot, you would say they have a big appetite, not that they "have a big hunger" (which just isn't idiomatic), or even that they are "very hungry". You might say "they're always hungry", but the "always" is now linking it to points in time - in this case, all points in time.

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    +1 for the last paragraph in particular. It's like the difference between climate and weather. Commented Oct 28 at 14:18
  • As an elaboration of the last paragraph, it may be worthwhile to note that although appetite may indeed be a relatively long-term disposition, it typically manifests itself only when one is actually eating, and the statements about somebody's appetite are therefore usually made in the context of describing how the person is eating ('eating with/without appetite'). Commented Oct 28 at 21:57
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    Furthermore, one can be hungry while, at the same time, having no appetite. "I don't want to eat, I just want to be no longer hungry" is a thing (especially when one isn't well, for various reasons). Commented Oct 29 at 8:36
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Hunger can refer to a feeling of needing food, whether or not one desires to consume any, while Appetite can refer to a desire to consume food that is completely independent from the body needing it.

One can be hungry but have no appetite. For example, if one's stomach is growling and they feel weak, but the thought of eating doesn't appeal to them at all, they can say they are hungry, but have no appetite.

Conversely, one can have an appetite without being hungry if, for example, they already had a large meal and feel full, but there is so much delicious food put out to eat and they still want to partake of it.

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    This is a concise and simple answer that covers the most important distinction well. Commented Oct 29 at 14:41
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"Appetite" can refer abstractly to any form of craving, not just for food.

Medieval philosophers and theologians often discuss the bodily appetites.

"I am an appetite." —Nosferatu

It can refer specifically to a person's (healthy or unhealthy) desire for nourishment, their wanting to eat food each day:

The child had a poor appetite and was losing weight.

Now that the worst of the flu had passed, her appetite was returning.

Constant snacking on junk food is often a response to boredom or anxiety, not a sign of a healthy appetite.

That meaning can be used figuratively:

She had lost her appetite for romantic comedies.

"Hunger" refers literally to acute or chronic craving for food:

She ate some granola to stave off hunger on the hike.

He had never known true hunger until he was shipwrecked on a small island.

but is used figuratively for any sort of craving:

The man seems to have an insatiable hunger for gold.

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    @EdwinAshworth I treat concrete examples as "supporting information". Commented Oct 28 at 12:09
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    I disagree with the distinction made here: I would understand both "appetite" and "hunger" to refer literally to food, but figuratively to some other desire. Indeed, your examples demonstrate exactly that: on its own, "appetite" is assumed to refer to food or eating; and "hunger" is just as readily applied to figurative uses. Commented Oct 28 at 15:39
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    @EdwinAshworth, no single person decides whether an example offered in support of something is convincing, although we can all express our views on the matter, by commenting and/or downvoting. An example, or any other kind of argument, is, however, not made any more convincing by the fact that somebody else has used it somewhere else, which is what you constantly seem to assuming. If one thinks that an argument is not convincing, one should present a counterargument, rather than just point out that the argument has not been borrowed from somewhere else. Commented Oct 28 at 21:42
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    @EdwinAshworth I don't flaunt that rule; I cite an authority or primary source evidence often. Here I thought that example sentences could serve as primary evidence of how the words are used. If someone thinks I've misused the word they can comment to that effect. If someone needs to consult some authority to verify the accuracy of what I've written here, they have no business opining on the question or the answer, IMO. I'm here only to help people with questions -- not to make money for the owners of this site in their desire to monetize its content. Commented Oct 28 at 23:49
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    @EdwinAshworth Have at it then. Do that grunt work yourself in your own answer if you think such an approach is better. I DO NOT. Good examples, IMO, are far better than definitions for such questions. It is often easier to understand a concept through language-in-action than through language-about-language. Commented Oct 29 at 9:46
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In English, many common concepts have two different words, with two different etymologies, and two different shades of politeness.

One word, such as lawyer, with a Germanic root, typically has a coarse, direct feeling. And the other word, such as attorney, with a French root, typically has a lyrical, euphemistic quality.

So it is with hunger and appetite. Hunger is rawer, and can cause pain and trouble; appetite is more roundabout and academic. Hunger is from proto-Germanic hungraz, and appetite is from Old French apetit or appétit. These are different levels of formality about the same thing, much like a fiddle and a violin.

If you have an appetite, you may carve out a slice of turkey for yourself; but if you are hungry, you may just grab the turkey leg and start gnawing at it.

It is this dual Germanic and French etymology, which permits English to convey situations high and low.

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    I literally wanted to give the same answer, and I think it is key to the respective "vibe" the two words have for us. In these Germanic vs. French/Latin word pairs, the French/Latin one is usually the more refined, having been introduced by the Norman upper class after the Conquest of England. Often, these are food terms like pork or beef. (For all it's worth, I read about this first studying Marx who notes this regarding worth/value and remarks that this is a general pattern.) Commented Oct 30 at 14:08

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