Definition of "hanker"

hanker

/ˈhæŋkə(ɹ)/

verb
third-person singular simple present hankers, present participle hankering, simple past and past participle hankered
1. To crave, want or desire.
  Quotations
  “O ’tis true enough, faith. I cannot understand Farmer Boldwood being such a fool at his time of life as to ho and hanker after thik[sic] woman in the way ’a do, and she not care a bit about en.”
  1874, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], page 289
  “Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a hungry man to hanker after.”
  1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus
  I objected. I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself.
  1889, Jerome K. Jerome, chapter 7, in Three Men in a Boat […] ‎
  […] it made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had always been hankering to be.
  1894, Mark Twain, chapter 1, in Tom Sawyer Abroad
  She bade him good-night and hurried down the road. Next day he took her in a little watch with a brooch to pin on her dress. She had been hankering for it.
  1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter LXI, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company
  […] the newly rich hanker after old aristocratic glitz.
  2012 October 13, “Very good, sir”, in The Economist‎