Stark means harshly bare and plain, with nothing softening it. A stark landscape, a stark warning, a stark choice.
It is also used of contrasts sharp enough to shock: in stark contrast, a stark difference. Stark warning and stark reality are near-fixed phrases in journalism. As an intensifier it means completely — stark naked, stark raving mad — where stark means utterly. Note that stark once meant strong and stiff, which survives in the German stark, meaning strong, and in the phrase stark and stiff.
1adjectivestarkHarshly bare and plain.
“It is a stark landscape and it takes a while to like.”
2adjectivesharpSharp enough to shock, of a contrast or fact.
“The figures stand in stark contrast to the promises.”
stark is a quality of harsh plainness.
Old English stearc meant stiff or strong, from a root meaning rigid. English kept the harshness and lost the strength, so a stark landscape is stiff rather than powerful — and stark naked is a corruption of start-naked, meaning tail-naked.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)terg- — rigid, stiff
Proto-Germanic
*starkuz — stiff, strong
Proto-West Germanic
*stark
Old English
stearc
Middle English
stark
English, today
stark
Built from
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 stq 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 stert naked, from stert (“tail”), a literal parallel to the modern butt naked.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sharper Adjectives