freezing

Pluralfreezings

1. 1
   adjective

   Extremely cold, cold enough to be uncomfortable or even painful.

   The wind off the lake was freezing by early evening.

   Workers in the freezing warehouse needed several extra layers.

   Similaricy, frigid, bitter, arctic

   Oppositeboiling, sweltering, scorching

   Note

   Hyperbole does most of the work here. A freezing office or a freezing walk home is bitterly cold but nowhere near frost. The word borrows the force of the literal frost sense so that it sounds colder than the thermometer reads. That makes it natural in conversation and complaint. Where an exact temperature matters, the zero-degree sense or a plain number says it better.

2. 2
   adjective

   So cold that frost forms, or itself afflicted by frost.

   A freezing wind coated the fields with frost overnight.

   The freezing temperatures damaged much of the citrus crop.

   Similaricy, frosty

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of freeze.

   Water was freezing on the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it.

   She spent the afternoon freezing the summer harvest for winter.

   Note

   One spelling covers three parts of speech, and the verb is the easiest to miss. It's freezing tonight can be the progressive of freeze, meaning the temperature is dropping below zero. It can also be simply the adjective for very cold. Only the adjective takes degree forms such as more freezing and most freezing. The participle also carries freeze's other meanings: a screen freezing mid-call, a deer freezing at a sound.

4. 4
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The shift of a substance from liquid to solid, brought on by cooling to a critically low temperature.

   Freezing is what hardens the surface of a pond in deep winter.

   The freezing of seawater happens at a lower temperature than fresh water.

   Similarsolidification

   Oppositemelting, thawing

   Note

   As the name of the process it is uncountable, but it turns countable when the change happens again and again. The plural freezings tends to travel with its opposite. James Macauley in 1829 describes a succession of thawings and freezings working the ground of New York. Kevin Revolinski (2015) credits the repeated freezings and unfreezings of the last Ice Age with breaking rock loose from quartzite bluffs.

5. 5
   adjective

   At zero degrees Celsius, the temperature at which water turns to ice.

   Overnight the temperature fell to freezing and the puddles iced over.

   It was a few degrees below freezing when we left this morning.

   Note

   A fixed reference point rather than a description, and it almost always follows above or below: two degrees below freezing, just above freezing. In that position it behaves like a noun that names the mark itself. The pattern holds even when the scale changes. Bruce Jakosky's The Search for Life on Other Planets (1998) puts the surface of Mars 50–60K below freezing and measures the gap in kelvins.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   The act of numbing part of the body using an anesthetic, especially in dentistry or minor surgery.

   The dentist administered a freezing before starting the procedure.

   He asked for an extra freezing because he could still feel the drill.

   Similaranesthetic

   Note

   In this medical use nothing actually turns to ice. The anesthetic numbs the area, and the word likens that loss of feeling to cold. It is countable, so a patient receives a freezing or asks for another one, much as one would ask for another injection. Keep it apart from the physical change of state. A dentist's chair rather than a laboratory almost always settles which meaning is intended.

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