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.
Critics argue that left the Fed with a blind spot, with policymakers unprepared for how stress at mortgage lenders would soon cast a deep freeze over the entire economy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 22, 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
Two years after a cold-storage operator delivered the year’s largest public offering, the U.S. market for refrigerated warehouse space is in the deep freeze.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 26, 2026
History reminds us big stand offs between London and Washington, such as the UK resisting American pressure to send troops to Vietnam, don't have to banish relations to a perpetual deep freeze.
From BBC ● Mar. 3, 2026
Mrs. Zuckerman lay dreaming about a deep freeze unit.
From "Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White
But since 2019, the two nations have plunged into a diplomatic deep-freeze so profound that Madrid sent no official representative to the 2024 inauguration marking Sheinbaum’s ascension as Mexico’s first woman president.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 18, 2026
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
The deep-freeze will be particularly dangerous for the homeless.
From Washington Times ● Dec. 20, 2022
Just as the deep-freeze in Texas caused extensive suffering and death from cold, Ida will likely cause extreme suffering from excessive heat, Welton and others said.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 30, 2021
I guess, in some twisted crevice of my mind, I was thinking I could do a deep-freeze voodoo thing on them—you know, conjure a couple of cold tickets into another chance with the warm girl.
From "Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet" by Joanne Proulx
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
He has also signed up with cryogenics company Alcor to be deep-frozen at the time of his death in the hope that he too can be resurrected.
From The Guardian ● Jun. 30, 2017
“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.
