ossify

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

After an era of vigorous growth, they ossify and die.

From Scientific American ● Nov. 23, 2019

The riots spread throughout Athens, then beyond into Thessaloniki and elsewhere in Europe, drawing many of the battle lines that would ossify once the Greek crisis erupted the following year.

From New York Times ● Jun. 18, 2018

These features may include impressions of sensory canals on the dermal bones of the skull, persistence of visceral arches, reduction in size of appendages, and failure of tarsal and carpal elements to ossify.

From The Ancestry of Modern Amphibia: A Review of the Evidence by Eaton, Theodore H. (Theodore Hildreth)

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

Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda have become ossified, Fitzgerald said, more intellectual property in a billion-dollar franchise than human beings evolving in organic ways.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 22, 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

What’s more, unlike the paintings bequeathed to posterity by Constable or Rembrandt, his music has not ossified, frozen for ever in time.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall

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

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

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