Late Middle English (in the sense 'plain, explicit'): from Latin nudus. The current sense is first found in noun use in the early 18th century.

• naked from Old English:

  The Old English word naked comes from the same ultimate root as nude (Late Middle English), Latin nudus. The sense of ‘blatant, clear, unashamed’, as in naked ambition, dates from the 13th century. The naked truth, meaning ‘the plain truth, without concealment or embellishment’, dates back to the 14th century. It may originally have developed as a translation of the Latin phrase nudaque veritas in the Odes of the Roman writer Horace, or have come from fables personifying Truth as a naked woman, in contrast to Falsehood, who is elaborately dressed. Stark naked is an alteration of start naked, which probably meant ‘naked even to the tail’, as a start was an animal's tail—as in the red-rumped bird the redstart (late 16th century). First recorded as early as 1530, stark naked developed into starkers in the 1920s. The change was made the easier because stark, which had meant ‘hard, stiff’ in Old English had come to mean ‘absolutely, utterly’ in late Middle English, as in stark staring mad. Words related to stark include the starch (Old English) used for stiffening clothes and probably the stork (Old English) from the bird's stiff posture.