Petrify vs Fossilize - What's the difference?
petrify | fossilize |
To harden organic matter by permeating with water and depositing dissolved minerals.
* (and other bibliographic particulars) Kirwan
To produce rigidity akin to stone.
To immobilize with fright.
To become stone, or of a stony hardness, as organic matter by calcareous deposits.
(figurative) To become stony, callous, or obdurate.
* (and other bibliographic particulars) Dryden
(figurative) To make callous or obdurate; to stupefy; to paralyze; to transform; as by petrification.
* (and other bibliographic particulars) (Alexander Pope)
* (and other bibliographic particulars) (George Eliot)
to make into a fossil
* 1989 , Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
to become a fossil
(figurative, by extension, intransitive) to become inflexible or outmoded
(figurative, by extension, transitive) To make antiquated, rigid, or fixed; to deaden.
* Elizabeth Browning
In intransitive terms the difference between petrify and fossilize
is that petrify is to become stone, or of a stony hardness, as organic matter by calcareous deposits while fossilize is to become a fossil.As verbs the difference between petrify and fossilize
is that petrify is to harden organic matter by permeating with water and depositing dissolved minerals while fossilize is to make into a fossil.petrify
English
Verb
- a river that petrifies any sort of wood or leaves
- Like Niobe we marble grow, / And petrify with grief.
- petrify a genius to a dunce
- A hideous fatalism, which ought, logically, to petrify your volition.
Synonyms
* See alsofossilize
English
Alternative forms
* fossiliseVerb
(fossiliz)- Most of the booths had been scooped clean by the scalpel-sharp corner of the glacier in the crash. Three remained. Two of them were punctured and, inside, the once-human occupants had been fossilized into the walls by centuries upon centuries of patient ice.
- Ten layers of birthdays on a woman's head / Are apt to fossilize her girlish mirth.