calcify
Americanverb (used with or without object)
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Physiology. to make or become calcareous or bony; harden by the deposit of calcium salts.
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Geology. to harden by deposition of calcium carbonate.
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to make or become rigid or intransigent, as in a political position.
verb
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to convert or be converted into lime
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to harden or become hardened by impregnation with calcium salts
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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calcifysimple
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calcifiessimple
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have calcifiedperfect
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has calcifiedperfect
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am calcifyingprogressive
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are calcifyingprogressive
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is calcifyingprogressive
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have been calcifyingperfect progressive
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has been calcifyingperfect progressive
Past
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calcifiedsimple
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had calcifiedperfect
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was calcifyingprogressive
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were calcifyingprogressive
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had been calcifyingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of calcify
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The late economist Mancur Olson described the danger that, in democracies, interest groups proliferate that cause the government to calcify until it is unable to act.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 2, 2026
But he said their stance "began to calcify into a sort of defensiveness".
From BBC ● Mar. 16, 2026
It’s to watch it harden and calcify in real time.
From Slate ● May 21, 2025
McKellar: The show is also about how ideologies sort of calcify and end up alienating people, even though they have noble aspirations at the beginning.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 30, 2024
With each month of silence that passed between them, she felt the silence itself calcify, and become a hard and hulking statue, impossible to defeat.
From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Networking isn’t like traditional manufacturing or energy infrastructure where market share calcifies over decades.
From Barron's ● Nov. 26, 2025
And the fact that this has been allowed for so long calcifies in the culture of Capitol Hill to the point that it’s just accepted.
From Slate ● Oct. 5, 2022
Boredom sometimes calcifies into loneliness, and for Daisy, the birds seemed to fix a problem I didn’t even know she had.
From New York Times ● Dec. 7, 2021
Emotions often drive reasoning, so as our hearts harden, our thinking also calcifies, and we become dogmatic.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 4, 2016
The center partly softens and partly calcifies into a grayish mortarlike mass, and is gritty.
From Special Report on Diseases of Cattle by United States. Bureau of Animal Industry
The later denial of his motion did not cool his grievances, but calcified them.
From Slate ● May 28, 2026
The hope had been to bring in major new foreign investment and create jobs – real ones, away from the calcified state sector – for Saudi Arabia's large and ever-growing young population.
From BBC ● May 25, 2026
It preserves three dimensional skin, calcified cartilage, and even traces of proteins.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 23, 2026
The Wives’ appeal is in the way they challenge such calcified definitions of “traditional” gender roles.
From Salon ● Mar. 21, 2026
When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman’s hair around its neck.
From "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The study focuses on three major groups of calcifying plankton: coccolithophores, foraminifers, and pteropods.
From Science Daily ● Feb. 8, 2026
But amid the platitudes, sadness and shock is calcifying into anger and tension.
From BBC ● Dec. 21, 2025
They know that, in special compartments, corals concentrate ions along with proteins and other molecules to make a slurry known as calcifying fluid.
From Science Magazine ● Oct. 24, 2023
The bitterness that he could pour into his words, rather than festering or calcifying on-screen, instead bloomed into something fully felt, vividly textured and often indescribably beautiful.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 8, 2023
Cal′cificā′tion, the process of calcifying, a changing into lime.—adjs.
From Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (part 1 of 4: A-D) by Various
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
