ossify

The risk is that such a containment policy could ossify into a stalemate that the regime will claim as a win.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 17, 2026

Or am I about to do something that is going to reinforce these divisions and ossify the boundaries between people?

From Salon ● Mar. 6, 2023

We know, for example, that when you hit your 60s and 70s, vocal folds weaken, cartilage in the larynx begins to ossify and respiratory systems that power voices start to work less efficiently.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2021

Nadal, who has a longstanding foot problem because his navicular bone did not correctly ossify during childhood, was upbeat about his progress after his loss to Harris.

From New York Times ● Aug. 12, 2021

The latter will always take care of themselves—the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us.

From Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Like every other detail here, that implicit complaint is dusty and ossified, and Mr. Williamson’s formerly wised-up dialogue has been supplanted by a grinding earnestness, with everyone constantly asking about one another’s feelings.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 26, 2026

The proposed cleanup and redevelopment of this ossified power plant joins a growing collection of such projects across the nation.

From New York Times ● Oct. 17, 2023

There are the ossified standbys—YouTube, TikTok, Instagram—platforms that are lucky enough to be piloted by someone who does not possess Musk’s deeply unserious, mean-spirited disposition.

From Slate ● Jul. 27, 2023

The moment seemed like a “plastic hour, ” a time that is ripe for national transformation because “an ossified social order suddenly turns pliable,” as George Packer wrote in the Atlantic then.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 16, 2022

First surprise flitted over his features, then it ossified to hostility.

From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It manifests now in a brittleness that tints their everyday exchanges as ossifying empty nesters.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 20, 2026

“It amounts to ossifying the damage that DeJoy managed to do over the last year,” they said.

From Slate ● Mar. 23, 2021

Everyone was afraid of the ossifying trend of East Coast companies taking over, killing the fun, dulling the spirit, and destroying the incubating interchange of cocktail napkins by patent lawyers.

From New York Times ● Feb. 5, 2018

That change of policy tack may jar ossifying market expectations.

From Reuters ● Aug. 3, 2016

The ossifying conviction that he was living out some ancient and preordained plan, encoded in his blood, built into the architecture of his name.

From "The Serpent King" by Jeff Zentner