The word was first recorded in Old English by about the year 1000, inherited from Germanic. The monk Ælfric, in his Lives of Saints, used it to describe what the eagle does better than any other bird at the sun's rays.
Native to English, with no borrowing from French or Latin. The same verb ran through Old High German and Old Icelandic, and by about 1250 the anonymous debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale used it to describe an owl that seemed ready to bite.
Behind it lay a Germanic verb meaning 'to be rigid'. That verb traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *ster-, meaning 'stiff', which may also lie behind a Greek word for 'solid'.
STARK and TORPEDO descend from the same ancient root as this word. STARK meant hard and unyielding in Old English. TORPEDO entered English in the 1520s from Latin, where it meant numbness, and named an electric ray fish.
Around 1523 Fitzherbert's agricultural guide, The Book of Husbandry, used it to describe hair standing on end. John Keats used it in his 1816 sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, in the lines about stout Cortez and his eagle eyes at the Pacific. In 2013 Singapore's Straits Times counted at least nine hours a day of it at our computer screens.
