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say it: PEH-truh-fahy
petrify is a verb meaning "cause to become stonelike or stiff or dazed and stunned from fright". It carries 3 recorded senses.
cause to become stonelike or stiff or dazed and stunned from fright
“The horror petrified his feelings”
“Fear petrified her thinking”
make rigid and set into a conventional pattern
“rigidify the training schedule”
“ossified teaching methods”
“slogans petrify our thinking”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for petrify come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.