How to Use ossify in a Sentence

ossify

verb

• The cartilage will ossify, becoming bone.
• At the end of the summer, the antlers ossify, and elk scrape the velvet off on trees.
  — The New Yorker, 7 Mar. 2022
• Sure, some of the show’s humor has ossified; parts have grown creaky and potentially perilous with age.
  — Richard Lawson, vanityfair.com, 26 Sep. 2017
• Ironize forms — such as the oral history or the rockumentary — that have ossified?
  — Lili Loofbourow, Washington Post, 3 Mar. 2023
• His worldview has ossified, and there is perhaps understandably a sense that his country has left him behind.
  — Charlie Campbell, Time, 2 May 2025
• The final age is the modern one, with the world now mostly settled and divided up, its borders more sharply defined and ossified.
  — Yussef Cole, New York Times, 8 Feb. 2025
• In recent years, his vernacular rhythm has ossified into a dull pastiche of itself.
  — Richard Lawson, HWD, 13 Oct. 2017
• In the past decade, factional divisions within the regime have narrowed; a hard-line consensus has ossified.
  — Suzanne Maloney, Foreign Affairs, 28 Feb. 2023
• But, like any method, this one risks becoming a mere habit, ossifying into a new convention both visual and thematic.
  — Richard Brody, New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2026
• But once a baby takes its first breaths, its bone-forming cells are hard at work to ossify that cartilage—or turn it into sturdier bone—and join all the pieces together.
  — Alex Schwartz, Popular Science, 5 Feb. 2020
• The pattern has only ossified since then; two years later, Republicans set for a red tsunami, if not at least a red wave got a ripple instead.
  — Prem Thakker, The New Republic, 1 May 2023
• The world has yet to ossify into routine; reality remains at the consistency of putty.
  — Sasha Geffen, Pitchfork, 21 Jan. 2026
• Meanwhile, the connection between our government and our largest companies has ossified.
  — Nick Bilton, The Hive, 13 Apr. 2018
• Unlike many people of their generation, Helen and Brice have not ossified in their emeritus years.
  — Douglas Friedman, Town & Country, 22 Oct. 2018
• Once born, however, a baby's bones begin to ossify, being surrounded and supplanted by harder, heavier bones.
  — Sam Walters, Discover Magazine, 3 Nov. 2023
• That order, despite its authoritarianism and fierce policing of the public sphere, never fully ossified.
  — Laura Secor, Foreign Affairs, 6 Dec. 2013
• Nadal, who has a longstanding foot problem because his navicular bone did not correctly ossify during childhood, was upbeat about his progress after his loss to Harris.
  — Ben Rothenberg, New York Times, 12 Aug. 2021
• What should be an inward-looking referendum on whether to overhaul Italy’s ossified political and electoral system has taken on much broader import.
  — Jason Horowitz, New York Times, 2 Dec. 2016
• What started in part as an effort in 1958 to break up cop and firefighter unions in Charlotte soon ossified into a state law covering all public employees.
  — Nick Martin, The New Republic, 31 Jan. 2020
• Once the answers become ossified, the questions become rhetorical, and the education ceases to cultivate the child’s capacities.
  — Ray Ravaglia, Forbes, 1 Oct. 2024
• Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse.
  — Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 27 Sep. 2024
• But even this species showed signs of direct development, with gradually ossifying bones rather than undergoing an abrupt, amphibian-like metamorphosis.
  — Jacek Krywko, ArsTechnica, 23 June 2026
• As the power of print and traditional media began to wane, television became the dominant form of media consumption, ossifying our metamorphosis to a chiefly visual culture.
  — Colin Scanlon, Redbook, 6 July 2023
• One of the authorities’ stated aims was the preservation of Bologna’s historic center, the idea being that to preserve was not to ossify but to invigorate, for the benefit of the inhabitants.
  — Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
• People care about identity, and a museum must set about ossifying the nebulous concept of collective identity into something tangible, something with plaques, displays and exhibits.
  — J.p Brammer, Los Angeles Times, 3 Aug. 2023
• The riots spread throughout Athens, then beyond into Thessaloniki and elsewhere in Europe, drawing many of the battle lines that would ossify once the Greek crisis erupted the following year.
  — Charly Wilder, New York Times, 18 June 2018
• In 2015, when King Salman took the throne, the nation was ossifying, its royal court and bureaucracy bloated, sclerotic and by the accounts of many Saudis, deeply corrupt.
  — Nic Robertson, CNN, 12 June 2023
• Revelations that at first seemed fatally poisonous to the presidency gradually ossified in Washington’s atmosphere.
  — Washington Post, 6 Feb. 2020
• In America some are already talking about regulating Facebook and other tech giants as utilities, forgetting that for decades, this ossified the telecommunications industry for decades.
  — The Economist, 22 Sep. 2017
• Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala’s communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power.
  — Rick Noack, Washington Post, 2 Nov. 2017