a state or period of halted or suspended activity or progress.
High interest rates created a deep freeze in housing construction.
suspended animation.
to quick-freeze (food).
to store in a frozen state.
An Americanism dating back to 1940–45
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"Relations remain in deep freeze," former Pakistani diplomat, Husain Haqqani, now a senior fellow at Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy and Hudson Institute, told the BBC.
From BBC ● May 7, 2026
Car sales got a boost after deep freeze across much of the country ended and customers were able to get to showrooms.
From MarketWatch ● Apr. 9, 2026
Don’t look now, but the housing market seems to be showing some signs of life after being in a deep freeze since 2023.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 12, 2026
“We’re in a deep freeze when it comes to the labor market,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 8, 2026
From the deep freeze he fetched rimed cartons of beans and strawberries, twenty years old.
From "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury
The committed band of Minneapolis residents organized spontaneously, defying the deep-freeze conditions to confront the operation that has ensnared longtime city residents.
From Barron's ● Jan. 28, 2026
This deep-freeze haven for comets is believed to stretch more than one-quarter of the way to the next star.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 27, 2023
The deep-freeze will be particularly dangerous for the homeless.
From Washington Times ● Dec. 20, 2022
This means it needs to be transported in a carefully controlled deep-freeze delivery chain.
From BBC ● Feb. 5, 2021
Within a few weeks the deep-freeze facilities of the institute were taxed to capacity, so that other specimens had to be refused.
From "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson
The researchers took weekly blood samples but did not find the culprit; so they deep-froze the samples and stored them.
From Time Magazine Archive
On land, permafrost melting and collapsing Arctic coastlines are dramatically altering ecological interactions and biogeochemistry due to the release of millennia-old carbon stores, trace elements, nutrients and potentially even deep-frozen ancient viruses and pathogenic bacteria.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 20, 2023
Until recently, the site had been deep-frozen in the subsoil known as permafrost.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 2, 2021
The Popeyes turkey I picked up last Wednesday night was a plastic-wrapped, deep-frozen behemoth that, I was informed, would take a full four days to defrost.
From Slate ● Nov. 21, 2018
Whereas the other two vaccines need to be deep-frozen, Johnson & Johnson's products will keep at temperatures between 2°C and 8°C, she said, a major advantage in remote areas.
From Science Magazine ● Jan. 9, 2015
“How far is that man going to sail? If we go on like this, we’ll soon be in Burano and as stiff as deep-frozen chickens.”
From "The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Funke
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.
