腹ペコ (harapeko)

What it means

1. 1.

   Starving; stomach completely empty. Childlike in flavour and used affectionately by adults.

Examples with translations

• もう腹ペコで死にそう。

  I'm so hungry I could die.

• 腹ペコだから何でもいい。

  I'm starving, so anything will do.

Where it comes from

腹 ('belly') plus ペコペコ, the onomatopoeia for something caving in — the sound-symbolic vocabulary Japanese uses far more systematically than English does.

Other forms

Romanised as:

harapeko