Iced

How to spell iced

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce iced

What does iced mean?

1. adjectiveCooled or served cold, usually with added ice.
2. verbPast tense of ice: to cover a cake or biscuit with a sugar coating, or to chill something with ice.

Iced in a sentence

• adjective

  Iced coffee outsells the hot version here every summer.

• verb

  She iced the birthday cake with thick buttercream the night before.

• adjective

  She ordered a tall glass of iced tea with lemon.

• verb

  He iced the champagne in a bucket before the guests arrived.

Where does iced come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built directly on the native English noun ice, which descends from the Old English is, meaning frozen water. That word has close cousins across the Germanic family, including the Dutch ijs and the German Eis, all tracing back to a shared Germanic root for ice. The verb to ice, meaning to cool with ice or to cover something with a frozen-looking sweet coating, developed from the noun, and iced is simply its past tense and the adjective formed from it. The culinary sense, where a cake is iced with sugar paste, arose in the 1700s because the smooth white coating resembled a sheet of ice. The spelling keeps the silent final e of ice before the -ed ending collapses the sound, so the word is pronounced with a single crisp s-t finish rather than a separate syllable.

How the word is built

• ice (frozen water)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)