Word.ws English Dictionary

stark

UK/stɑːk//stɑɹk/

stark adjective: hard, firm; obdurate.

Adjective

stark (comparative starker, superlative starkest)

  1. (obsolete) Hard, firm; obdurate.
  2. 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.2013 May 11, “The climate of Tibet: Pole-land”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8835, page 80
  3. (archaic, literary, poetic) Strong; vigorous; powerful.
    • Stark beer, boy, stout and strong beer.c. 1622, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger [et al.?], “Beggars Bush”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, →OCLC, Act III...
    • a stark, moss-trooping Scot1805, Walter Scott, “(please specify the page)”, in The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem, London: […] [James Ballantyne] for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, […], and A[rchibald] Constable and Co....
  4. Stiff, rigid.
    • His heauie head, deuoide of carefull carke, / Whose sences all were straight benumbd and starke.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 44
    • Many a nobleman lies stark and stiff / Under the hoofs of vaunting enemies.c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
  5. Plain in appearance; barren, desolate.
    • 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...2004, Gary Lutz, “Uncle”, in Peter Conners, editor, PP/FF: An Anthology, Buffalo, N.Y.: Starcherone Books, published 2006, →ISBN, page 179
  6. Naked.
    • 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 […]1817 December, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Revolt of Islam. […]”, in [Mary] Shelley, editor, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. […], volume I, London: Edward Moxon […], published 1839, →OCLC...
  7. Complete, absolute, full.
    • I screamed in stark terror.
    • A flower was growing, in stark contrast, out of the sidewalk.

Adverb

stark (not comparable)

  1. Starkly; entirely, absolutely.
    • He's gone stark, staring mad.
    • She was just standing there, stark naked.

Verb

stark (third-person singular simple present starks, present participle starking, simple past and past participle starked)

  1. (dialectal, obsolete) To stiffen.

Proper noun capitalized: Stark

Stark (countable and uncountable, plural Starks)

  1. A surname.
  2. An unincorporated community in Butts County, Georgia.
  3. An unincorporated community in Stark County, Illinois.
  4. A tiny city in Neosho County, Kansas.
  5. An unincorporated community in Elliott County, Kentucky.
  6. An unincorporated community in Pike County, Missouri.
  7. A small town in Coos County, New Hampshire.
  8. A small town in Herkimer County, New York, named after John Stark.
  9. An unincorporated community in Boone County, West Virginia.
  10. A small town in Vernon County, Wisconsin.

Noun capitalized: Stark

Stark (uncountable)

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

stark meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada

stark in Urdu

stark
اجاڑ منظر ujāṛ maṉzar

stark in Bengali

কঠোর, রূঢ়, নগ্ন

stark in Malayalam

സാക്ഷാൽ, പൂർണ്ണമായ, കഠിനമായ, ഊക്കനായ, തികഞ്ഞ

stark in Kannada

ಬಾಗದ, ಪೆಡಸಾದ, ಹಾಳುಬಿದ್ದ, ಯಾರೂ ಇಲ್ಲದ, ಬರೀ, ಕಠಿಣವಾದ
More languagesFewer languages
stark in Punjabi
ਪੂਰਾ pūrā

Examples of stark in a sentence

  • 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.2007 January 28, Michael Pollan, “Unhappy Meals”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
  • Consider, first, the stark security / The commonwealth is in now.1611, Ben[jamin] Jonson, Catiline His Conspiracy, London: […] [William Stansby?] for Walter Burre, →OCLC, (please specify the page):
  • Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 17, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers...
  • […] held him strangled in his arms till he was stark dead.1655, Thomas Fuller, The Church-history of Britain; […], London: […] Iohn Williams […], →OCLC, (please specify |book=I to XI):

All 40 example sentences with stark

Forms of stark

Adjective
comparativestarker
superlativestarkest
Verb
third-person singular presentstarks
present participlestarking
past participlestarked
paststarked
Proper noun
pluralStarks

Origin of stark

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.

From Middle English starken, from Old English stearcian (“to stiffen, become hard, grow stiff or hard”), from Proto-Germanic *starkōną, *starkēną (“to stiffen, become hard”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)terg- (“rigid, stiff”). Cognate with German erstarken (“to strengthen”).

* As a Scottish and English surname, from the adjective stark. * As a Jewish, German, and Swedish surname, from stark (“strong”), related to the above. This surname also appears in Czech and Slovak as Štark.

Words formed from stark

Phrases with stark

Words that rhyme with stark

28 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about stark

What does stark mean?
Stark means hard, firm; obdurate.
What is stark in Urdu?
Stark in Urdu is اجاڑ منظر (ujāṛ maṉzar). See Stark meaning in Urdu.
How do you use stark in a sentence?
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.
What part of speech is stark?
Stark can be an adjective, an adverb, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce stark?
Stark is pronounced /stɑɹk/ (US).

Words near stark in the dictionary

  1. staring spells
  2. staringly
  3. starings
  4. starjump
  5. starjumps
  6. stark
  7. stark bollock naked
  8. Stark County
  9. Stark effect
  10. stark naked
  11. stark raving mad

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stark (page history and authors); Stark (page history and authors); اجاڑ منظر (Urdu) (page history and authors); stark (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); stark (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); stark (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ਪੂਰਾ (Punjabi) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-stark.ogg.

Cite this entry: “stark.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stark. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.