Froze

How to spell froze

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce froze

What does froze mean?

1. verbBecame solid or icy through extreme cold; turned to ice.
2. verbSuddenly became completely still, often from fear or surprise.
3. verbOf a computer or screen, stopped responding to input.

Froze in a sentence

• The pond froze solid during the long cold snap.

• She froze in the doorway when she heard the loud crash.

• The laptop froze in the middle of the video call.

• The pipes froze overnight and burst by morning.

• The cat froze the moment it noticed the dog across the yard.

• The display froze and would not accept any clicks.

Where does froze come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'freeze', which descends from the Old English 'frēosan', meaning 'to turn to ice' or 'to be very cold'. That verb belonged to a strong Germanic class whose past tenses were formed not by adding an ending but by changing the root vowel, a pattern called ablaut; the same mechanism gives us 'sing, sang, sung' and 'drive, drove, driven'. The Old English past forms shifted over centuries into the modern 'froze' (past) and 'frozen' (past participle), which is why the spelling looks so different from the present tense. The root traces back to a Germanic source related to Latin 'pruina' (hoarfrost) and shares deep ancestry with words like 'frost'. The trap for writers is purely the long 'o' sound: it is spelled with a plain 'o' and a silent final 'e', not 'froase' or 'froze' confusions, and there is no doubled letter.

How the word is built

• froze (irregular past tense of freeze, formed by vowel change from the root freos- 'to freeze')