PETRIFY • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Petrify

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/pˈɛtrəfˌaɪ/ Listen

Petrify

verb

(past & past part. petrified; pres. part. petrifying)

Cause to become stonelike or stiff or dazed and stunned. "Fear petrified her thinking"

Change into stone. Synonym: lapidify.

Make rigid and set into a conventional pattern. Synonyms: ossify, rigidify. "Ossified teaching methods" , "Slogans petrify our thinking"

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"Petrify" Quotes from Famous Books

... cold had touched even its insensibility, and made the tracks resound and the paving blocks rattle in the clear air; through deep cisterns of streets, between lofty stone banks—as stern almost as their governing boards, for, although boards are chiefly wooden, a supplication will quickly petrify them; through rows of illuminated stores like walls of Arabian Night visions, with traceries of frost on their windows richer in design than the gems within them; through clustering crowds that entered or left continually the swinging doors of saloons and hotels; past waiting carriages; ...

— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... and touching none. He may indeed (if sober all this time) Plague with dispute, or persecute with rhyme. 260 We only furnish what he cannot use, Or wed to what he must divorce, a Muse: Full in the midst of Euclid dip at once, And petrify a genius to a dunce;[407] Or, set on metaphysic ground to prance, Show all his paces, not a step advance. With the same cement, ever sure to bind, We bring to one dead level every mind. Then take ...

— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... glad you came," she said with great cordiality, seating herself near the other and beaming on her. "I haven't seen a soul since one o'clock and I was beginning to petrify." ...

— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther

... more than an accidental value until they call before the curtain of the mind those monarchs themselves. It is the business of the archaeologist to awake the dreaming dead: not to send the living to sleep. It is his business to make the stones tell their tale: not to petrify the listener. It is his business to put motion and commotion into the past that the present may see and hear: not to pin it down, spatchcocked, like a dead thing. In a word, the archaeologist must be in command of that faculty which is known as the historic imagination, ...

— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall