stark

Hard, firm; obdurate.

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.

Strong; vigorous; powerful.

Stark beer, boy, stout and strong beer.

a stark, moss-trooping Scot

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.

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 transportations: you keep an ear cocked ever after for the return of his van and its paraphernalian clatter in the gravelled driveway.

Starkly; entirely, absolutely.

He's gone stark, staring mad.

She was just standing there, stark naked.

To stiffen.