fossilize
Americanverb (used with object)
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Geology. to convert into a fossil; replace organic with mineral substances in the remains of an organism.
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to change as if into mere lifeless remains or traces of the past.
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to make rigidly antiquated.
Time has fossilized such methods.
verb (used without object)
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to become a fossil or like a fossil.
The plant fossilized in comparatively recent geologic time.
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Linguistics. (of a linguistic form, feature, rule, etc.) to become permanently established in the interlanguage of a second-language learner in a form that is deviant from the target-language norm and that continues to appear in performance regardless of further exposure to the target language.
verb
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to convert or be converted into a fossil
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to become or cause to become antiquated or inflexible
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of fossilize
Explanation
When something fossilizes, it becomes a fossil, meaning it leaves an impression in the Earth that far outlives the organism. Fossils are remnants left in rock of a living creature: the remnants have been petrified over many years and they leave an impression of what the animal was like. Fossilizing is a word for this process, which happens slowly over time. If dinosaurs had not fossilized, we wouldn't know much about what dinosaurs were like. The most likely parts of a creature to fossilize are hard parts like bones and shells.
Vocabulary lists containing fossilize
Awkward
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Primates
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Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
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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:
Tracing the origins of octopuses has long been difficult because their soft bodies rarely fossilize.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 25, 2026
Brain tissue doesn’t fossilize, and so researchers examine the shape and size of the brain cavity in fossilized dinosaur skulls to deduce what their brains may have been like.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 29, 2024
My mom emigrated from South Korea in 1967, bringing a set of flavors, techniques and recipes that would fossilize from that moment.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 9, 2023
Historically, reports of scientists finding fossilized brain tissue have been controversial because it was once thought that nervous tissue couldn’t fossilize, Live Science previously reported.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 5, 2022
If she kept changing, she could never fossilize into the thing their father had become .
From "Blood of Olympus" by Rick Riordan
It’s an auction record for a fossilized dinosaur skeleton, beating the $44.6 million that Citadel founder Kenneth Griffin paid two years ago for Apex, a 150-million-year old Stegosaurus.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 14, 2026
It’s an auction record for a fossilized dinosaur skeleton, beating a 150-million-year-old Stegosaurus that sold for $44.6 million two years ago.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 14, 2026
There, another paleontologist had shown him fossilized wasp cocoons, which are small mud chambers where developing larvae mature into adults.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 5, 2026
It has 183 fossilized bones and is roughly 63 percent complete.
From Barron's ● Jul. 1, 2026
The eggy daffodils on the wallpaper'd fossilized to slag-heap gray as the light faded.
From "Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell
The world-renowned site features iron carbonate concretions that formed some 309 million years ago, fossilizing within them ancient creatures that had once thrived in the area's lush swamps, shallow seas and river deltas.
From Barron's ● Jun. 18, 2026
The challenges associated with fossilizing soft tissues make the trilobites Losso studied even more special.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 21, 2023
Fish skeletons — even after fossilizing — retain records of an animal's growth, which depends on seasonal food availability.
From Scientific American ● Feb. 23, 2022
After his summer of fossilizing, Grinnell worked for his father’s securities-trading firm in New York and then as an aide to Marsh in New Haven.
From Washington Post ● Jul. 18, 2019
Between the trenches the earth was torn and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing process, in its moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus.
From A Traveller in War-Time by Churchill, Winston
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.
