fossilize

present singular third person fossilizes · participle present fossilizing · participle past fossilized · past fossilized · alternative fossilise

1. transitiveTo make into a fossil.

   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.

   1989, Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

2. intransitiveTo become a fossil.

   Synonyms: fossilate, fossilify

3. broadlyfigurativelyintransitiveTo become inflexible or outmoded.

   I was getting fossilised myself, but of late my stock of ideas has been very much enlarged.

   1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC

4. broadlyfigurativelytransitiveTo make antiquated, rigid, or fixed; to deaden.

   I'll meet you again Blanketed in soil Fossilized in photographs

   2013, Days N' Daze, “Blue Jays”, in Rogue Taxidermy

   1 more example

   Ten layers of birthdays on a woman's head / Are apt to fossilize her girlish mirth.

   1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Eighth Book”, in Aurora Leigh, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1857, →OCLC