Icing

How to spell icing

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce icing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does icing mean?

1. nounA sweet sugar coating spread over cakes and biscuits.
2. nounIn ice hockey, an infringement where a player shoots the puck across the centre line and the goal line without it being touched.

Icing in a sentence

• She spread a thick layer of icing over the sponge cake.

• The referee called icing when the defender cleared the puck the length of the rink.

• The children licked the leftover icing from the bowl.

• A quick pass avoided icing and kept play moving in the offensive zone.

Where does icing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the native English noun 'ice', which descends from Old English 'is', meaning frozen water, and traces back to a common Germanic root shared with the German 'Eis' and the Dutch 'ijs'. The verb 'to ice' developed the sense of covering something with a smooth, glossy layer, and bakers borrowed that idea in the 1700s for the white sugar coating spread over cakes, which resembled a sheet of ice. Adding the suffix '-ing' turned the verb into a noun naming the coating itself. The hockey sense came later, in the early 1900s, describing the act of shooting the puck the length of the rink, said to come from the idea of sending it sliding across the ice. Because the word is spelled with a single 'c' and a soft 'c' sound, writers sometimes wrongly double the consonant, but it simply follows 'ice' with its silent final 'e' dropped before '-ing'.

How the word is built

• ice (frozen water; by extension a frozen-looking sugar coating)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix)