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Petrify   Listen
verb
Petrify  v. t.  (past & past part. petrified; pres. part. petrifying)  
1.
To convert, as any animal or vegetable matter, into stone or stony substance; as, petrified wood. "A river that petrifies any sort of wood or leaves."
2.
To make callous or obdurate; to transform, as by petrifaction; as, to petrify the heart. Young. "Petrifying accuracy." "And petrify a genius to a dunce." "A hideous fatalism, which ought, logically, to petrify your volition."
3.
To paralyze, especially with fear; to stupefy; as, she was petrified by the sight of the bear in her tent. "The poor, petrified journeyman, quite unconscious of what he was doing."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Petrify" Quotes from Famous Books



... abhor what is profound. Women also will always find local miracle more easy to understand than universal miracle, and the visible objective intervention of God more probable than his psychological and inward action. The Latin world by its mental form is doomed to petrify its abstractions, and to remain forever outside the inmost sanctuary of life, that central hearth where ideas are still undivided, without shape or determination. The Latin mind makes everything objective, because ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Nature, and Love a conspiracy; whose law is an iron chain and whose mercy is debility and chagrin; the blind fiend who would impose his own blindness; that unfruitful loin which curses fertility; that stony heart which would petrify the generations of man; before whom life withers away appalled and death would shudder again to its tomb. Repentance! they wiped the inadequate ooze from their eyes and danced joyfully for spite. They could do no more, so ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... while, as substantial and useful results, I will have my rare bit of sport, and he will know more about the wicked world against which he is to preach. By and by he will marry a pious Western giantess, whose worst dissipation is a Sunday-school picnic, and will often petrify her soul with horror and wonder by describing that awful little pagan, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... malverigo, malverigxo. Pervious penetrebla. Pest pesto. Pester enui, turmenteti. Pestiferous pesta. Pestilence pesto. Pestilential pesta, pestiga. Pestle pistilo. Pet dorloti. Petal florfolieto. Petard petardo. Petition petegi. Petition petskribo. Petrify sxtonigi. Petroleum petrolo. Petticoat subjupo. Pettish malgxentila. Petty malgranda. Petulance petoleco. Petulant petola. Pew pregxbenko. Pewter stano. Phantom apero, fantomo. Pharmacist farmaciisto. Pharmacy (place) farmaciejo, apoteko. Pharmacy (science) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... their analysis and discovery, and that just as they no longer fit the facts when the attempt is made to extend their application to past historical epochs and, still more, to pre-historic and ante-historic times, so it is absurd to attempt to apply them to the future and thus vainly try to petrify and perpetuate present ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... savants who are practically occupied with astronomy, millions of eyes are raised to this celestial splendor, and for a moment millions of human beings feel some curiosity about the mysteries of the Infinite. The brutalities of daily life would fain petrify our dreams, but thought is not yet stifled to the point of checking all aspirations after eternal truth, and when we gaze at the starry sky it is hard not to ask ourselves the nature of those other worlds, and the place occupied by our own planet in the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... to petrify them. I put my right hand under the pistoli's armpit, while the general helped him on the other side, and thus we took him to the inn, which happened to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... cannot be brought directly into relation with the forms of our thought. Accordingly, it has to express itself by symbols, which are as it were the flesh and bones of ideas. It is the tendency of all symbols to petrify or evaporate, and either process is fatal to them. They soon repudiate their mystical origin, and forthwith lose their religious content. Then comes a return to the fresh springs of the inner life—a revival of spirituality in the midst of formalism ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge



Words linked to "Petrify" :   fossilize, deaden, rigidify, stiffen, blunt, petrifaction, fossilise, lapidify, petrification



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