Word of the Day:
petrify
What It Means
To turn to stone: to harden organic matter by permeating with water and depositing dissolved minerals.
To produce rigidity akin to stone.
To immobilize with fright.
Petrify in Context
“A hideous fatalism, which ought, logically, to petrify your volition.”
Did You Know?
From Middle French pétrifier, from Medieval Latin petrificāre, from Latin petra (“rock”), from Ancient Greek πέτρα (pétra, “rock”) + -ficāre, from facere (“do, make”), equivalent to petro- + -ify.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: petrify (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “petrify.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/petrify. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
