Noun: stern
| Singular | stern |
| Plural | sterns |
Sample Sentences
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Holonyms: watercraft < vessel
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Old Applegate, in the stern, just set and looked at me, and Lord James, amidship, waved both arms and kept hollering for help. I took a couple of everlasting big strokes and managed to grab hold of the skiff's rail, close to the stern. [1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:]
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and sit chiefest stern of public weal [1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]:]
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And all attonce her beaſtly bodie raizd / With doubled forces high aboue the ground: / Tho wrapping vp her wrethed ſterne arownd, / Lept fierce vpon his ſhield, [...] [1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 18, page 8:]
Nouns inflected like stern
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English sterne, likely from Old Norse stjórn (“control, steering”), related to stýra (“to steer”), from Proto-Germanic *stiurijaną, whence also English steer. Also possibly from Old Frisian stiarne (“rudder”), from the same Germanic root. The sense referring to a management post alludes to the fact that a sailing ship's captain would often stand on an aft deck. See: Middle English Nouns '
sterne', Middle English Nouns '
sterne'.