What she probably meant was that she was ' sleepy ' , not ' tired '

I think she learns English vocabs from an English-Thai dictionary which is usually useless.

A lot of Thais think 'tired' only means 'เหนื่อย' i.e. having done too much work, which differs from 'sleepy' which means "ง่วง" i.e. when its late at night and you feel like sleeping, even though you may not have worked at all.

I'm sure I've heard my wife, who's from the North, say 'huang [M]non'.  I'm not sure of the tone of the first word.  Could it be a blend of what in Standard Thai are หิว [R]hiu and ง่วง [F]nguang?  (It would make sense as a dialect variation if the etymologically correct spelling were หง้วง, but I've no evidence that the standard spelling is unetymological and have some very shaky evidence that it is etymological.)

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My g/f gave me a very simple reason why in Isaan they say "hiu" (หิว) rather than "nguang" (ง่วง). She says "hiu" is easier to say (They're a clever lot in Isaan, aren't they?)

Maybe it was the conversation.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz