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

He noted that true babies would probably not ossify into fossils, as their bones are too small.

From New York Times ● Apr. 29, 2022

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

In the meanwhile, I wish to Heaven my heart would ossify!

From The Lady of the Decoration by Frances Little

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

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

Since then, the sprawling content business that the New York Times Book Review mystery columnist Sarah Weinman has called the true-crime industrial complex has matured and ossified.

From New York Times ● Feb. 22, 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

Merely rational thought—forgive me for preaching, but I must, I must!—merely rational thought leaves the mind incurably crippled in a closed and ossified system, it can only extrapolate from the past.

From "Grendel" by John Gardner

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 20, 2026

In the years before the pandemic, many economists fretted about the declining rate of turnover, which they worried was a sign of an increasingly stagnant, even ossifying labor market.

From New York Times ● Jan. 3, 2023

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

From Slate ● Mar. 23, 2021

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