A state in which nothing is moving forward — things are neither getting better nor getting worse, they are simply held still. It is a formal, written word, at home in political writing ('the peace talks have reached a stasis'), in literary criticism, and in business analysis. The feeling attached to it is nearly always negative: not restful stillness but stuck-ness, the frustration of a situation that should be developing and is not. Note it is uncountable and usually appears in a few set frames: 'in a state of stasis', 'a period of stasis', 'to remain in stasis'. It has two other lives worth knowing. In medicine it means a stopping of natural flow in the body, as in 'venous stasis', blood not moving properly through the veins. And in science fiction 'stasis' is the frozen sleep travellers are put into for long voyages — 'in stasis for two hundred years' — which is where most young readers meet it first. The plural, rarely needed, is 'stases'.