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stark

adj
/stɑɹk/US/stɑːk/UK

Etymology

From Middle English stark, starc, from Old English stearc, starc (“stiff, rigid, unyielding, obstinate, hard, strong, severe, violent”), from Proto-West Germanic *stark, from Proto-Germanic *starkuz (“stiff, strong”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)terg- (“rigid, stiff”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian sterc (“strong”), Dutch sterk (“strong”), Low German sterk (“strong”), German stark (“strong”), Danish stærk (“strong”), Swedish stark (“strong”), Norwegian sterk (“strong”), Icelandic sterkur (“strong”). Related to starch. In the phrase stark naked: an alternation of Middle English stert naked, from stert (“tail”), a literal parallel to the modern butt naked.

  1. derived from *(s)terg-✻ — “rigid, stiff”
  2. inherited from *starkuz✻ — “stiff, strong”
  3. inherited from *stark✻
  4. inherited from stearc
  5. inherited from stark

Definitions

  1. Hard, firm

    Hard, firm; obdurate.

  2. Severe

    Severe; violent; fierce (now usually in describing the weather).

    • Of all the transitions brought about on the Earth’s surface by temperature change, the melting of ice into water is the starkest. It is binary. And for the land beneath, the air above and the life around, it changes everything.

  3. Strong

    Strong; vigorous; powerful.

    • Stark beer, boy, stout and strong beer.
    • a stark, moss-trooping Scot
  4. ›+ 9 more definitions

    1. Stiff, rigid.

      • His heauie head, deuoide of carefull carke, / Whose sences all were straight benumbd and starke.
      • Many a nobleman lies stark and stiff / Under the hoofs of vaunting enemies.
      • The north is not so stark and cold.

    2. Plain in appearance

      Plain in appearance; barren, desolate.

      • I picked my way forlornly through the stark, sharp rocks.
      • First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement.

    3. Naked.

    4. Complete, absolute, full.

      • I screamed in stark terror.
      • A flower was growing, in stark contrast, out of the sidewalk.
      • Consider, first, the stark security / The commonwealth is in now.

    5. Starkly

      Starkly; entirely, absolutely.

      • He's gone stark, staring mad.
      • She was just standing there, stark naked.
      • […] held him strangled in his arms till he was stark dead.

    6. To stiffen.

    7. A surname.

    8. A number of places in the United States

      A number of places in the United States:

    9. The language spoken in the Ender's Game series, which is nearly identical to American…

      The language spoken in the Ender's Game series, which is nearly identical to American English.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for stark. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA