stark
Part of speech: adj
adv
Morphological type: simple
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.
Inflected forms:
form: starker
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: starkest
pos: adj
tags: superlative
Senses:
gloss: Hard, firm; obdurate.
pos: adj
tags: obsolete
gloss: Severe; violent; fierce (now usually in describing the weather).
pos: adj
examples: 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.
gloss: Strong; vigorous; powerful.
pos: adj
tags: archaic
literary
poetic
examples: Stark beer, boy, stout and strong beer.
a stark, moss-trooping Scot
gloss: Stiff, rigid.
pos: adj
examples: 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.
gloss: Plain in appearance; barren, desolate.
pos: adj
examples: I picked my way forlornly through the stark, sharp rocks.
I would have to remind her, counteringly, that you don’t pick the person who fronts your life—you get picked, you watch the picker’s ankles vanish into the scrunched socks afterward (his whole body going blank behind the blue-black of the uniform), and the picker goes off in the starkest of transportations: you keep an ear cocked ever after for the return of his van and its paraphernalian clatter in the gravelled driveway.
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.
The modern, glass-fronted buildings surrounding the massive skyscraper Taipei 101 in the Xinyi District suggest a shift toward cleaner, starker development, but a trip to older parts of the city reveals hidden corners untouched by modernity.
The oldest section, Wanhua, with its winding corridors and quiet decay, offers a glimpse of the city’s bygone days. At its bustling heart is the busy Longshan Temple. I bump past a flurry of tourists, worshipers and monks selling prayer beads outside the gates to reach the controlled chaos within, where hundreds of faithful light incense and present offerings at myriad shrines to Buddha and other deities.
gloss: Naked.
pos: adj
examples: They bore me to a cavern in the hill
Beneath that column, and unbound me there;
And one did strip me stark; and one did fill
A vessel from the putrid pool; one bare
A lighted torch, and four with friendless care
Guided my steps the cavern-paths along […]
gloss: Complete, absolute, full.
pos: adj
examples: 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.
1689 (first published posthumously), John Selden, Table-Talk
Rhetoric is very good or stark naught; there's no medium in rhetoric.
Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense
gloss: Starkly; entirely, absolutely.
pos: adv
tags: not-comparable
examples: He's gone stark, staring mad.
She was just standing there, stark naked.
[…] held him strangled in his arms till he was stark dead.
“… That woman is stark mad, Lord Stranleigh. Her own father recognised it when he bereft her of all power in the great business he founded. …”
Derived words: starken
starkly
starkness
Translations: