Freeze

How to spell freeze

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce freeze

What does freeze mean?

1. verbTo turn to ice or become solid through cold, or to stop moving and hold completely still.
2. verbTo stop something at its current level or suspend it, especially wages, prices, or accounts.
3. nounA period of very cold weather, or an official halt on spending, hiring, or prices.

Freeze in a sentence

• verb

  Leave the bottle outside overnight and the water will freeze solid.

• verb

  The company plans to freeze all salaries until profits recover.

• noun

  The overnight freeze left a thick layer of ice on every windscreen.

• verb

  The cold snap could freeze the pipes under the kitchen sink.

• verb

  The court ordered the bank to freeze the suspect's accounts.

• noun

  Management announced a hiring freeze for the rest of the year.

Where does freeze come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Freeze descends from the Old English verb frēosan, meaning 'to turn into ice' or 'to be very cold', which traces back to a Proto-Germanic root freusan and ultimately to an ancient Indo-European root prus meaning 'frost' or 'to burn with cold'. The same family gives us 'frost' and 'frozen', and the German verb frieren and Dutch vriezen are close cousins. The double 'e' spelling settled in over the centuries to mark the long vowel sound, distinguishing it from short-vowel relatives. From the literal sense of water hardening into ice, English extended the word figuratively to mean holding perfectly still (as in freezing with fear) and, by the twentieth century, to financial and administrative senses such as freezing wages or prices. Its trickiest trap is that it is a perfect homophone of 'frieze', the decorative band on a wall, so the meaning, not the sound, must guide the spelling.

How the word is built

• freeze (from Old English frēosan: to turn to ice); single native root, no affixes