The word 'ice' descends from Old English 'īs' (ice), from Proto-Germanic *īsą (ice), from a PIE form *h₁eyH-s- (ice, frost) that is well attested in Germanic but has few clear cognates outside the family. German 'Eis,' Dutch 'ijs,' Swedish 'is,' Danish 'is,' Norwegian 'is,' Icelandic 'ís,' and Old Norse 'íss' all descend regularly from Proto-Germanic *īsą.
The modern English pronunciation /aɪs/ — with the diphthong of 'eye' — is the result of the Great Vowel Shift, the systematic restructuring of English long vowels between roughly 1400 and 1700. In Middle English, 'ice' was pronounced approximately /iːs/ (rhyming with modern 'geese'). The Great Vowel Shift raised and then diphthongized this long /iː/ to /aɪ/. The same shift affected 'time' (formerly /tiːm/), 'mice' (formerly /miːs/), and hundreds of other words
The compound 'icicle' conceals a tautology. Old English 'īsgicel' combines 'īs' (ice) with 'gicel' (a piece of ice, an icicle). The element 'gicel' was itself a word for hanging ice — it survives in dialectal English 'ickle' and in the place name 'Ickleton.' Over centuries, speakers forgot that '-ickle' already meant ice, so the compound became opaque and 'icicle' was understood as a single indivisible word. This is a common linguistic phenomenon
'Iceberg' entered English in the 1770s from Dutch 'ijsberg' (ice mountain), a compound of 'ijs' (ice) + 'berg' (mountain). The metaphor 'tip of the iceberg' — meaning the small visible portion of a much larger hidden problem — dates from the early twentieth century and refers to the fact that roughly 90 percent of a floating iceberg's mass is below the waterline.
'Iceland' (Icelandic 'Ísland') was named by the Norse settler Flóki Vilgerðarson in the 9th century after he saw drift ice in the fjords. The name may be somewhat misleading — Iceland is far less icy than Greenland — and medieval tradition holds that the name was deliberately discouraging to prevent overpopulation of the island.
The figurative uses of 'ice' are extensive. 'To break the ice' (to initiate social interaction, to overcome initial stiffness) dates from the 1580s, originally a nautical metaphor about ships breaking through frozen waterways to open a channel. 'Cold as ice,' 'ice-cold,' and 'icy' as metaphors for emotional detachment draw on the obvious physical properties of ice — its hardness, its lack of warmth, its resistance to touch. To 'ice' a cake (to cover it with a smooth, hard layer of sugar) dates from the 1720s, extending the concept of a frozen coating to a sweet