stern

Etymology 1

From Middle English stern, sterne, sturne, from Old English styrne (“stern, grave, strict, austere, hard, severe, cruel”), from Proto-Germanic *sturnijaz (“angry, astonished, shocked”), from Proto-Indo-European *ster- (“rigid, stiff”). Cognate with Scots stern (“bold, courageous, fierce, resolute”), Old High German stornēn (“to be astonished”), Dutch stuurs (“glum, austere”), Swedish stursk (“insolent”).

adj

1. Having a hardness and severity of nature or manner.
   Risk is everywhere. From tabloid headlines insisting that coffee causes cancer (yesterday, of course, it cured it) to stern government warnings about alcohol and driving, the world is teeming with goblins. 2013-06-22, “Snakes and ladders”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, page 76
2. Grim and forbidding in appearance.

Etymology 2

Most 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.

noun

1. (nautical) The rear part or after end of a ship or vessel.
   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. Lincoln, chapter 7, in Mr. Pratt's Patients
2. (figurative) The post of management or direction.
3. The hinder part of anything.
4. The tail of an animal; now used only of the tail of a dog.

verb

1. (obsolete, transitive, intransitive) To steer, to direct the course of (a ship).
2. (transitive, intransitive, nautical) To propel or move backward or stern-first in the water.

Etymology 3

From a variant of tern.

noun

1. A bird, the black tern.