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 dorsal end of the ventral arm of the squamosal and the posterior arm of the squamosal ossify as a unit at the same time the quadratojugal appears.

From Neotropical Hylid Frogs, Genus Smilisca by William E. Duellman

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

Nor can you, apparently, be a successful, divorced, outspoken biracial American career woman and thrive among the hierarchically ossified, stiff-upper-lip royal family.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 2, 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

Ironize forms — such as the oral history or the rockumentary — that have ossified?

From Washington Post ● Mar. 3, 2023

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

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

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