stiff

Meaning

1. Rigid; hard to bend; inflexible.
2. Inflexible; rigid.
3. Formal in behavior; unrelaxed.
4. (colloquial) Harsh, severe.
5. Painful or more rigid than usual as a result of excessive or unaccustomed exercise.
6. Potent.
7. (informal) Dead, deceased.
8. (slang) Erect.
9. Having a dense consistency; thick; (by extension) Difficult to stir.
10. Beaten until so aerated that they stand up straight on their own.
11. Of an equation, for which certain numerical solving methods are numerically unstable, unless the step size is taken to be extremely small.
12. Keeping upright.
13. Of a shot, landing so close to the flagstick that it should be very easy to sink the ball with the next shot.
14. Delivered more forcefully than needed, whether intentionally or accidentally, thus causing legitimate pain to the opponent.

rigid

hard

dead body

frozen to death

lie flat

be hard

standfast

stiff necked

stiff with cold

trenchant

become erect

form-only

of the body

not natural

boardy

numb with weariness

very stiff

be cold

Frequency

Pronounced as (IPA)

/stɪf/

From Middle English stiff, stiffe, stif, from Old English stīf, from Proto-West Germanic *stīf, from Proto-Germanic *stīfaz, from Proto-Indo-European *steypós. See also West Frisian stiif, Dutch stijf, Norwegian Bokmål stiv, German steif; also Latin stīpes, stīpō, from which English stevedore. The expected Modern English form would be /staɪf/; /stɪf/ is probably originally from compounds such as stiffly, where the vowel was shortened before a consonant cluster.