Other forms: frozen, freezing, freezes, froze
To freeze is to go hard and solid in the cold. Water freezes into ice in the tray, the puddle by the gate freezes overnight, you freeze the leftover soup in a box and find it a year later.
It also means to stop dead. A deer freezes in the headlights, a video freezes halfway through, a police officer shouts "Freeze!" and everybody stands still. Money freezes too: a pay freeze, a rent freeze, a frozen bank account — all held exactly where they are. And you say "I'm freezing" when you are simply very cold, with no ice in sight. Watch the forms, because they are irregular: freeze, froze, frozen. The noun is a freeze — a hard freeze in the weather, a hiring freeze at work.
1verbfreezeTo turn to ice, or to become hard and solid, in the cold.~11%
“The pond freezes over every January.”
2verbstoreTo store food in a freezer to keep it.~11%
“You can freeze the soup in small boxes.”
3verbmovingTo stop moving completely, out of fear or shock.~2%
“She would freeze whenever the phone rang late at night.”
4verbfundsTo hold prices, pay or funds at their present level.~10%
“The company will freeze wages for another year.”
5verbcomputerOf a computer or screen: to stop responding.~2%
“The screen freezes every time I open that file.”
6nounspellA spell of freezing weather, or an official hold on prices or pay.~64%
“A pay freeze was announced in March.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Freeze is an old northern word that never travelled. Old English had frēosan, from Proto-Germanic *freusaną, "to freeze", back to the Proto-Indo-European root *prews-, "to freeze; frost". Its cousins fill the cold half of Europe: Dutch vriezen, German frieren, Danish fryse, Icelandic frjósa.
Middle English
fresen
English, today
freeze
From Middle English fresen. From Middle English fresen, from Old English frēosan (“to freeze”), from Proto-West Germanic freusan, from Proto-Germanic freusaną (“to freeze”), from Proto-Indo-European prews- (“to freeze; frost”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA