I’m currently in Las Vegas. It is hot here; certainly (to me, who has just come through a long, cold Canadian winter) hotter than I expected.
Anyway. While I was out walking today, in the hot sunshine, there was a man selling “ice cold water.” And I got to wondering what “ice cold water” was.
“Ice water” is easy enough: it is liquid water formed by melting ice. “Cold water” is similarly easy; it is liquid water at something less than ambient temperature.
But “ice cold water”? Wouldn’t that be just … ice?
(This is looking for opinions, but is also a mundane and pointless question. I will leave it to the mods to move to IMHO as they wish.)
Actually, at the triple point, H[sub]2[/sub]O exists in liquid, solid, and gaseous state simultaneously. And then there’s supercooling, where water stays liquid far below the usual freezing point. So it’s not just an expression.
In the lab, we often use a slurry of water and ice to maintain a constant temperature very close to zero degrees. At equilibrium, any heat such a system absorbs goes to turning ice into liquid water instead of raising the temperature. So as long as you have both liquid and solid water at the same time, you can be sure of the temperature. The liquid water in such a system would be, I would suggest, “ice cold water”.
When I read the OP, I was going to mention the temperature at the phase change; but I was beaten twice. See what I get for sleeping all night?
I say ‘water heater’. When I was in high school some of my friends published a couple/few issues of a parody of the school’s ‘magazine’. (The school’s copied-and-stapled publication was called The Ubiquity. The parody was called The Ubigot.) One of the ‘classified ads’ was ‘Wanted: Hot water heater to heat hot water.’ (Another was ‘Wanted: Home tutor to teach ignorant house.’)
But referring to ice is just as imprecise as referring to liquid water. Ice can have all sorts of temperatures, from 0 degrees C all the way down. It’s only from the point of phase change that a precise temperature can be inferred.
As others have stated, at standard pressure you can have liquid water and ice coexisting at 0 Celsius.
Generally, I would assume “ice cold water” is either water with ice cubes in it, or maybe bottled water that has been cooled in ice. In both cases, their temperature may be at or only slightly above 0 Celsius.
“Ice water” is water with ice cubes in it. “Cold water” is water that is subjectively cold. “Ice-cold water” is water that it subjectively very cold; it need not have ice in it. Ice water can be either cold water or ice-cold water, depending on a given person’s subjective opinion about how cold the water is.
