stark naked
adjective, noun
- adjective Completely naked.
- noun (slang, archaic) Raw gin.
Synonyms
nude strip me naked bare-assed bare-ass in the altogether in the buff in the raw raw peeled naked as a jaybird
Etymology
From Middle English stert naked (steort nakt, sternaked, star naked); the first element is from Old English steort (“tail”). The change from "start-naked" to "stark-naked" was most likely by folk etymology due to a misinterpretation of the phrase as being a way of saying "starkly naked" ("strongly naked, harshly naked"). The opposite change has shifted buck naked to butt naked in colloquial modern English.
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 — from the Wiktionary entry “stark naked”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details