vitrify
Americanverb (used with or without object)
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to convert or be converted into glass.
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to make or become vitreous.
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of vitrify
Explanation
If you vitrify something, you turn it into glass or a glass-like substance. Glassmakers can vitrify sand to make glass. Chemists study how substances change. One such extreme change is when a substance is vitrified, or turned into glass through heating and rapid cooling. Scientists can vitrify substances in the lab. Substances can also be vitrified in nature — due to a lightning strike, for instance. Vitrify is related to vitreous, meaning “glassy.”
Vocabulary lists containing vitrify
The Mayor of Casterbridge
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Red, White & Royal Blue
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The Innocents Abroad
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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:
DOE’s Savannah River, S.C., site began operating a facility to vitrify less complex radioactive waste in 1996.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 14, 2024
The process to vitrify waste at Hanford is highly complex and involves multiple steps.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 25, 2024
Last October, the first of two melters used to actually vitrify the waste became active, with the second melter scheduled to launch this spring.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 25, 2024
Initially, the vitrification plant will glassify the least radioactive waste in the tanks, with plans still being made to vitrify the high-level radioactive tank waste.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 27, 2023
Good brick earth is not simple clay, but a compound substance; and what is essential is that it should burn hard or, in other words, partly vitrify under the action of heat.
From Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 by Various
“This is iron that was in my studio that, after I fired it, melted and vitrified and became part of the piece.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 29, 2026
Once we know that vitrified brain tissue is a thing we can look out for, it's possible that we'll start finding more examples of this currently unique process, Mann said.
From Salon ● Mar. 4, 2025
Only material containing some liquid can turn to glass, meaning that the bones could not have vitrified.
From BBC ● Feb. 27, 2025
Eventually, vitrified low-activity waste will be disposed of on-site in stainless steel casks, and a separate melter just for high-level waste will come online to manage the most toxic waste.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 25, 2024
Five bus-loads of boys and girls, singing or in a silent embracement, rolled past them over the vitrified highway.
From "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
The Department of Energy’s goal is to start vitrifying radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, some since World War II, by the end of 2023.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 9, 2022
DOE plans to expand the vitrification plant to treat the remainder of the low-activity waste, but it is also looking at alternatives to vitrifying some of the low-activity waste.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 12, 2022
Those lines—the hunger for experience, the resentment vitrifying into potency—could have flown out of “Paradise Lost.”
From The New Yorker ● Oct. 10, 2019
Two or three times the electric fluid struck the beach, melting and vitrifying the sand.
From The Mysterious Island by Stephen W. White
But if any soluble salt, such as borax, nitre, or soda, is employed, it is necessary to render them insoluble, by vitrifying them together with other substances.
From British Manufacturing Industries Pottery, Glass and Silicates, Furniture and Woodwork. by L. Arnoux
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.
