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

Instead of melting Mr. Waring's obduracy seemed to ossify under the effects of tears and entreaties.

From The Haunted Homestead A Novel by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

Despite their reputation for being ossified, “many major European companies are malleable now,” says Sarah Ketterer, chief executive of Causeway Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based global investment firm.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 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

All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft.

From "1984" by George Orwell

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

Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala’s communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 26, 2017

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