adj, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
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"Meronym: saccharide"
"this Professor is to give the society their stiffening, and infuse into their manners that beautiful political starch, which may qualify them for Levées, Conferences, Visits"
"The thought of the gun in his back put some starch in him. He needed the handrail, and he limped step by step, but he ascended at his full height."
"You're the starch in my collar / You're the lace in my shoe / You will always be my necessity / I'd be lost without you"
"She starched her blouses."
"misrepresenting Sobriety as a Starch and Formal, and Vertue as a Laborious and Slavish thing"
"Come to that the uniform had a bit more starch than that I usually wear, it's a bit uncomfortable."
A widely diffused vegetable substance, found in seeds, bulbs and tubers, as extracted (e.g. from potatoes, corn, rice, etc.) in the form of a white, glistening, granular or powdery substance, without taste or smell, and giving a very peculiar creaking sound when rubbed between the fingers. It is used as a food, in the production of commercial grape sugar, for stiffening linen in laundries, in making paste, etc.
Common synonyms include: aggressiveness, albumen, amylose substrate, amylum, arrowroot, bang.
Come to that the uniform had a bit more starch than that I usually wear, it's a bit uncomfortable.
Pronounced /stɑɹt͡ʃ/.
From Middle English starche, sterche, from Old English *stierċe (“stiffness, rigidity, strength”), from Proto-West Germanic *starkī (“stiffness, rigidity, fortitude, strength”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *sterg- (“stiff, rigid”). Cognate with dialectal Dutch sterk (“strong”), Middle Low German sterke (“strength”), German Stärke (“strength", also "starch”), Swedish stärkelse (“starch”), Icelandic sterkja (“starch”). Related to English stark (“stiff, strong, vigorous, powerful”).