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frozen phrase

Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A poetic phrase that evokes stillness, cold, or emotional paralysis; it arrests movement, suggesting a moment of suspended time, frozen feeling, or the chill of despair.

Detailed Definition
Frozen phrases use ice, silence, and halted motion to convey isolation or arrested feeling; they articulate emotional paralysis or timeless stasis, where warmth and movement feel impossibly distant.
Example
Example in poetry:
The phrase was frozen in the ice of time; it had not changed since the first whisper; the words lay still, untouched by tongue or pen; the frozen phrase was the first and last word.
Additional Notes
Frozen phrases evoke stillness or emotional suspension: “The phrase was frozen in the ice of time”; they suggest trauma, repression, or arrested grief; use cold imagery, stasis, and silence; related to stony phrase, hollow phrase, and breath phrase; ideal for poems of repression, memory, or loss.
Also Known As
frozen expression static phrase immobilized phrase
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