WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
n. the process of fossilizing a plant or animal that existed in some earlier age; the process of being turned to stone
n. becoming inflexible or out of date
Word Usage
"The former hypothesis has some justification, for Chinese prose was sufficiently young to have escaped, as yet, on the whole, the later processes of "fossilisation", by being divorced from the actual spoken language. 3"