Definitions

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

  • noun The natural process of bone formation.
  • noun The hardening or calcification of soft tissue into a bonelike material.
  • noun A mass or deposit of such material.
  • noun The process of becoming set in a rigidly conventional pattern, as of behavior, habits, or beliefs.
  • noun Rigid, unimaginative convention.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The formation of bone; the act or process of changing or of being changed into bone, or into a bony substance; the change so effected: as, the ossification of cartilage. See osteogenesis.
  • noun That which is ossified, or the result of ossification; bone in general.
  • noun The state or quality of being ossified.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Physiol.) The formation of bone; the process, in the growth of an animal, by which inorganic material (mainly lime salts) is deposited in cartilage or membrane, forming bony tissue; ostosis.
  • noun The state of being changed into a bony substance; also, a mass or point of ossified tissue.

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

  • noun the normal process by which bone is formed
  • noun the calcification of tissue into a bonelike mass; the mass so formed
  • noun the process of becoming set in one's ways or beliefs; rigid conventionality

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

  • noun the developmental process of bone formation
  • noun the calcification of soft tissue into a bonelike material
  • noun the process of becoming rigidly fixed in a conventional pattern of thought or behavior
  • noun hardened conventionality

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The formation of the Haversian canals for the passage of blood-vessels to nourish the bones, the earlier construction of bony tissue by a metamorphosis of cartilaginous substance, and also the commencement of ossification at distinct points, called _centers of ossification_, are all important subjects, requiring the student's careful attention.

    The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand Ray Vaughn Pierce 1877

  • The replacement called "ossification" begins in the center of the limb bone and continues toward proximal and distal ends of the bone simulataneously.

    Archive 2007-06-01 Sarah Werning 2007

  • The replacement called "ossification" begins in the center of the limb bone and continues toward proximal and distal ends of the bone simulataneously.

    Historiffic Sarah Werning 2007

  • Students of the regulatory process refer to this as the "ossification" of the rulemaking process.

    Npr Monograph 7 Regulatory Systems Part ITY National Archives 1994

  • Students of the regulatory process refer to this as the "ossification" of the rulemaking process.

    Npr Monograph 7 On Regulatory Systems Part ITY National Archives 1994

  • Students of the regulatory process refer to this as the "ossification" of the rulemaking process.

    Npr Monograph 7 On Regulatory Systems Part B ITY National Archives 1993

  • The "bone in the heart" of which he speaks was probably the cruciform ossification which is normally found in the ox and the stag below the origin of the aorta.

    Fathers of Biology Charles McRae

  • It attracts media attention, and in an age of viral social media replication, well-placed, high-profile actions have a multiplier effect that can shake people up - the actions become "seared into our moral consciousness," and help to break up what Choi referred to as the "ossification" of the establishment part of the movement.

    365 Gay News 2010

  • The ablest minds in the world have thought and are thinking that if we could find a way of preventing the hardening of the cells of the system, producing in turn hardened arteries and what is meant by the general term "ossification," that the process of aging, growing old, could be greatly retarded, and that the condition of perpetual youth that we seem to catch glimpses of in rare individuals here and there could be made a more common occurrence than we find it today.

    The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit Ralph Waldo Trine 1912

  • But with that illness ends, I think, the period of his youth, and of his genius, that is to say, of that high-wrought and passionate austerity and independence of character which was to him what artistic endowment is to other writers; and with that illness begins a premature old age, mental and moral, decrepitude gradually showing itself in a kind of ossification of the whole personality; the decrepitude which corresponds, on the other side of a brief manhood of comparative strength and health, to the morally inert and sickly years of Alfieri's strange youth.

    The Countess of Albany Vernon Lee 1895

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