Do You Say “Iced Tea” or “Ice Tea”?

Photo by Julia D’Alkmin on Unsplash

Food News! 

It’s definitely hot enough to break out the SUMMER drinks… and conveniently, TODAY is National Iced Tea Day.

Here’s the thing though:  Do you call it ICED tea… or ICE tea?

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, both are fine… but it’s actually supposed to be ICED, with the D.  ICE tea has become more common in speaking because English-speakers regularly leave out sounds in everyday words, out of… well… laziness.

Examples include:  “First,” “left,” and “found.”  Think about it… you have probably heard them without that last letter being enunciated.  Especially in a case like saying, “first thing,” where it just blends into the sound of “firs thing.”

You might be thinking:  This is dumb…it doesn’t change the spelling.  But it CAN over time.

Did you know that ICE CREAM was originally “iced cream,” but it takes extra effort to enunciate the “st-kr” sounds separately back-to-back… so ice cream went from being lazy to THE new default spelling.

The same thing made:  Boxed set – box set… skimmed milk – skim milk… waxed paper – wax paper… and whipped cream – whip cream.

And the same thing could happen to iced tea.  Right now, iced tea is six times more common than ice tea in a database of U.S. news sources, but it’s only about two times more common in a database of U.K. news sources.

Back to ICED TEA, according to a survey from last summer…

53% of American adults say iced tea is the ideal beverage for sipping on the porch, deck, or outside… and about half say iced tea reminds them of summer or time spent outdoors. So grab some iced tea and kick off summertime.

SOURCE: Merriam Webster