Lapidification
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act or process of lapidifying; fossilization; petrifaction, turning to stone countable, uncountable
"For anybody, though, not part of it all (which was obviously Ishmail's plight), that world was nothing but a smooth, cyclical continuum, without a fold in it, without any form of articulation, as compact as stucco or staff, as putty or portland; an imbrication of nights without adjoining days, a total lapidification, a flat, hard, constant, monotonous uniformity in which all things, big or small, smooth or lumpish, living or not, form a solitary, global unit."
Example
More examples"For anybody, though, not part of it all (which was obviously Ishmail's plight), that world was nothing but a smooth, cyclical continuum, without a fold in it, without any form of articulation, as compact as stucco or staff, as putty or portland; an imbrication of nights without adjoining days, a total lapidification, a flat, hard, constant, monotonous uniformity in which all things, big or small, smooth or lumpish, living or not, form a solitary, global unit."
Etymology
Compare French lapidification.
More for "lapidification"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.