Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The process of freezing and storing the body of a diseased, recently deceased person to prevent tissue decomposition so that at some future time the person might be brought back to life upon development of new medical cures.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The cryopreservation of a person with medical needs that cannot be met by available medicine until resuscitation and healing by future medicine is possible.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the freezing of a seriously ill or recently deceased person to stop tissues from decomposing; the body is preserved until new medical cures are developed that might bring the person back to life

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[cry(o)– + -onics, as in bionics.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From cryo- + -ics.

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Examples

  • In 1976, after retiring from teaching, he founded the Cryonics Institute, adopting the word "cryonics" from cryogenics, a field of physics that studies how materials behave at very low temperatures.

    NYT > Home Page By PAUL VITELLO 2011

  • For the most part, when people think of cryonics, people think about long-term cryonics - that is, freezing people who are dead so they can be revived at some point in the future, as in the mythical frozen corpse of Walt Disney.

    Forbes.com: News Forbes Blogs 2011

  • The story, accusations that people who had their bodies frozen at extremely low temperatures -- a practice called cryonics -- may have been abused by a company that stored their remains.

    CNN Transcript Oct 9, 2009 2009

  • Mr. Ettinger's ideas, which he popularized in a 1963 book, "The Prospect of Immortality," spawned what some refer to as the cryonics movement, though by most accounts it is a small endeavor: a scattering of enterprises around the country with dues-paying customers totaling a few thousand, a few hundred of whom have actually been deep-frozen.

    NYT > Home Page By PAUL VITELLO 2011

  • One critic went so far as to dub cryonics "quackery's last shot at you."

    Gazette.com : JOHN C. ENSSLIN 2010

  • The process, known as cryonics, is conducted with the hope that someday scientists will be able to bring the subjects back to life.

    unknown title 2009

  • The process, known as cryonics, is conducted with the hope that someday scientists will be able to bring the subjects back to life.

    Long Island Press 2009

  • BLITZER: Well, without getting into the specifics of Ted Williams, which I understand you won't discuss, you can't discuss, would it be normal, though, in this kind of cryonics procedure to separate the head from the body?

    CNN Transcript Aug 13, 2003 2003

  • This was taken at a cryonics facility in Phoenix, Arizona, called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

    Photographer Murray Ballard's best shot 2011

  • Corvi-Mora, SE11, Fri to 31 JulSSMurray Ballard's The Prospect Of Immortality is the outcome of five years of photographic investigation into the cryonics industry, the technique of deep-freezing a human corpse in the belief or hope that future scientific advances might enable it to be brought back to life.

    This week's new exhibitions 2011

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