1. starch - Noun
2. starch - Adjective
3. starch - Verb
Stiff; precise; rigid.
A widely diffused vegetable substance found especially in seeds, bulbs, and tubers, and extracted (as from potatoes, corn, rice, etc.) as 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.
Fig.: A stiff, formal manner; formality.
To stiffen with starch.
Source: Webster's dictionaryFaith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. E. M. Forster
Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life. Maya Angelou
Humour is a great vehicle for getting a message across. If you get too serious, you could die of starch. Cyndi Lauper
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness. George Eliot
... we English people delight in a moral - not a moral to be deduced or inferred, but a nice, rounded, little moral, in all the starch of set sentences, and placed just at the end. Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Carbohydrates, and especially refined ones like sugar, make you produce lots of extra insulin. I've been keeping my intake really low ever since I discovered this. I've cut out all starch such as potatoes, noodles, rice, bread and pasta. Cynthia Kenyon