Fossilize
verb ·3 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To make into a fossil. transitive
"Most of the booths had been scooped clean by the scalpel-sharp corner of the glacier in the crash. Three remained. Two of them were punctured and, inside, the once-human occupants had been fossilized into the walls by centuries upon centuries of patient ice."
- 2 become mentally inflexible wordnet
- 3 To become a fossil. intransitive
- 4 convert to a fossil wordnet
- 5 To become inflexible or outmoded. broadly, figuratively, intransitive
"I was getting fossilised myself, but of late my stock of ideas has been very much enlarged."
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- 6 To make antiquated, rigid, or fixed; to deaden. broadly, figuratively, transitive
"Ten layers of birthdays on a woman's head / Are apt to fossilize her girlish mirth."
Example
More examples"Like arthropods today, trilobites molted as they grew, shedding their old exoskeleton. These molts could fossilize, so one animal could leave several different sized fossils behind."
Etymology
From fossil + -ize.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.