Tea Blog

It occurred to me recently that I’ve seen the type of tea that we drink chilled referred to as both “ice tea” and “iced tea.” It’s not something I ever paid close attention to and I’m pretty sure that the latter spelling is the more popular but I thought it merited looking into a little more closely.

Nowadays it seems that everything on the Internet begins with Wikipedia. While I wouldn’t use it for anything even close to serious research, it can be useful sometimes as a jumping off point. So what does Wikipedia have to say on the question of “iced tea” or “ice tea”? Well, given the fact that the article title is listed as the former, with the other version in parentheses, it’s probably safe to say that we know where things stand. According to another Internet giant, the “iced” version brings back a total of 16 million search results, while “ice tea” returns a mere 15 million. I’m not sure what that tells us, if anything.

If we look to the supposed experts on this sort of thing, it would seem that “iced” is preferred, while “ice” is generally considered an acceptable alternative. So say the good people at Merriam-Webster and the exalted Oxford English Dictionary, who apparently only added “iced tea” as a word in late 2012. At the Grammarist, they claim that “ice” has become more common, even though there are still many who consider it to be incorrect.

If we dip into the deep, dark depths of history we find that “iced” appears to be common in some of the early references to the beverage. Such as the 1905 book, The Original Buckeye Cook Book and Practical Housekeeping: A Compilation of Choice and Carefully Tested Recipes, which recommends cold-brewing iced tea starting the night before and adding ice just before serving. More than an quarter of a century earlier, in Housekeeping in Old Virginia, “iced tea” is also the term of choice and the recommendation is to use green tea to make it.

If you’re counting on the big guns of the tea world to provide some wisdom and guidance on this matter, then you may be disappointed in at least one case. I wasn’t able to discern the rhyme or reason behind Lipton’s decision to use “iced” on some of their products on “ice” on some others, but it seems that the latter version turns up more often on their products outside of the United States. Here’s an example.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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