What it names now
Stiff is the ordinary English word for matter that resists a bend: a board, a collar, a frozen sail, a neck after a bad night. From that core it spreads. A person can be stiff in company, unrelaxed and formal. A penalty or a price can be stiff, meaning severe. A drink or a wind can be stiff, meaning strong. Cream and dough can be stiff when they will not flow. Slang made a noun of it, a corpse, and a verb, to leave someone unpaid. The senses look like a pile of idioms. They are not. They are one physical idea, kept in English since before the Norman Conquest and then put to work on weather, manners, money, and the dead.
The origin of the word stiff is a native story, not a loan from French or Latin.
Old English, then a spelling crowd
The older English adjective was stīf. It meant rigid, inflexible, not easily bent. The earliest surviving witness is a single Old English gloss in the Prudentius Glosses, matching a Latin word for a rigid beard. That is thin evidence, but it is enough to date the word to the Old English period, before 1150, and to mark it as inherited Germanic rather than a later import.
Middle English wrote it in a crowd of forms: stif, stijf, styf, stiffe, and others. The modern spelling stiff is the one that settled. The vowel did not settle so quietly. Old English stīf had a long vowel. On the usual English sound changes, that should have given a modern word that rhymes with life. Standard English instead has a short vowel, as in if. Historical linguists do not agree on why. One account, associated with Otto Jespersen, is that the long vowel shortened in compounds such as stiffly, where a cluster of consonants followed the vowel, and that shortened form then replaced the simple adjective. Another, noted in the historical dictionaries, is that Old English may have had a short-vowel variant beside the long one, and that the short form won in the standard language. Some modern dialects still have a longer vowel, which is why the mismatch is visible at all. Dutch stijf and German steif kept the long vowel that English, in its standard form, did not.
A Germanic adjective, and a disputed deeper root
English inherited the word from Proto-Germanic *stīfaz, reconstructed with the sense inflexible. The West Germanic relatives are close: Dutch stijf, German steif, West Frisian stiif. North Frisian has related forms that may go back to an unattested Old Frisian adjective. Swedish styf and Danish and Norwegian stiv look like members of the same set, but they are often explained as loans from Low German rather than as independent northern inheritances. The family is therefore securely West Germanic even when the modern map looks wider.
Beyond Germanic, handbooks usually compare a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as *steip- or *steyp-, with a sense of pressing, packing, or cramming. Latin stipare, to pack or compress, sits here, as does stipes, a post or tree trunk. Lithuanian has stiprus, strong, and a verb meaning to stiffen or grow rigid. Sanskrit and Greek forms for coagulating, small stones, and pressing together are sometimes listed on the same side. English stevedore, the dock worker who stows cargo, comes by a Romance path from that Latin packing verb, so it is a distant cousin of stiff by meaning and by a proposed common ancestor, not by direct borrowing into English.
That deeper link is widely printed and still not beyond challenge. Dirk Boutkan suggested that the Germanic adjectives might be a figurative use of words for a staff or stick: rigidity named from a wooden rod. If that reading is right, the Latin packing family is a resemblance rather than a parent. The Germanic descent into English is the solid part. How far back the name of rigidity goes, and whether it began as packed matter or as a staff, remains an argument.
How the sense moved
The physical meaning never left. English then extended it. By the mid-thirteenth century the adjective could describe a battle or contest that would not yield: fierce, stubborn, hard-fought. Around 1300 it attached to winds and currents, and also to movement that was not easy or natural. Middle English could use it for a person or thing that was powerful, staunch, and unmoving, and it often stood beside strong in alliterative pairs.
Early in the fifteenth century it described substances that would not flow, thick and tenacious. That material sense is still ordinary in kitchens: stiff dough, egg whites beaten until they stand. Around 1600 a social sense is recorded: rigidly ceremonious, not easy or gracious in manner. The body that will not bend became the person who will not unbend. A stiff drink, in the sense of a potent one, is recorded from 1813. Keep a stiff upper lip appears from 1811: the face that refuses to tremble, another moral reading of the same refusal to yield.
Slang then took death. Because the adjective had been associated with the rigidity of a corpse since around 1200, by 1859 a stiff could mean a dead body. From that cluster came later American uses: a contemptible person or a rough fellow by the 1880s, a working stiff by 1930, a racehorse bound to lose by 1890, and a drunkard by 1907. Restaurant and hotel workers in the United States, by 1934, used the verb to stiff for a customer who left no tip. The dead pay nothing; the sense of cheating someone followed by about 1950. None of these later jobs needed a new etymon. They are the old unyielding quality, applied to people, luck, and money.
The leftover that still shows
The word has no prefix and no suffix in its basic form. Stiffen, stiffness, and stiffly are later English build-outs from the same adjective, not pieces inherited as a package from Latin. The history that still sits in the mouth is the short vowel. Speakers of standard English say stiff against the grain of Old English stīf and against the long vowels of Dutch stijf and German steif. That mismatch is the fingerprint of a native adjective in continuous use since before 1150, reshaped by compounds, dialects, and habit, while the idea of matter that will not bend kept finding new work.