So they call them icen cubes, but they aren’t really cubes, are they?
I’m talking about the kind of ice you get out of a modern freezer’s ice tray. They have the shape as if you had bisected a circle with a chord and then extended that two dimensional shape into the z-axis. Flat on one end, curved on the other, if you get my drift.
The incorrectness of calling it a cube caught my attention, and I wondered if anyone on the board has a good name for this common shape.
I mean “ice,” not “icen.”
Sorry.
For that matter, what’s the name of the sorta truncated pyramid that you get out of an ice tray? Four of the faces are trapezoids, but the top and bottom are rectangles.
Frustrum of a pyramid.
To clarify, it sounds to me like you are talking about a freezer with an automatic ice maker. Is this correct, or do you mean the plastic trays that you fill out of the faucet and put in the freezer?
(Not that answering will get you any help from me, as I wouldn’t know the answer either way).
An automatic ice maker, exactly. Sorry if that wasn’t clear (and re-reading the OP, it wasn’t).
Cylindrical section?
Well, if you take a full circle and extend it along the z-axis, you would have a cylinder. The part of a circle that is “cut off” by a chord is called a circular segment. So if someone put a gun to my head and forced me to give that “ice cube” shape a name, I’d call it a cylindrical segment.
Irregular four-sided-solid?
Round these parts they are called moon cubes.
Round these parts we call them ice cubes. 
Doesn’t matter that they’re not cuboid.
WAG Chordal segment?
A straight sided section of the circumference of a short cylinder.
Sort of looks like the rocker off a chair with the inside of the curve filled in up to a line connecting the two ends.
I’m quite sure there is a specific name for this specific shape. Just cant recall or find it.
hockey puck split vertically ?
mabye a polygon
I just call it “ice”. Or “piece of ice” if I want to be more specific.
“Fill this cup with ice.”
“I dropped a piece of ice on the floor.”
I have always heard and referred to the 1/2 round ice “cubes” as crescent-shaped. Oxymoronically, it seems they are always called ice cubes, even when the shape is anything but cubical. Stranger still, it never struck me as odd until just now to hear someone refer to round ice cubes, or crescent ice cubes.
Something made of gold is golden.
Something made of silk is silken.
Something made of wood is wooden.
Something made of wool is woolen.
So the suffix -en must mean ‘made of’.
Then there’s “icen.” Makes sense, actually.
This seems the most reasonable to me.
A semi-circular prism
or
half a cylinder
This is quite interesting because all of the ice trays I’ve ever used have produced ice pieces that **are ** roughly cubic. I just measured one from my refrigerator (geeky I know) and it’s about 3.2 cm x 3.0 cm x 3.0cm.
When I first saw the thread title, I was thinking parallelopiped.
The household freezer trays for making cubes I remember in the old days produced skewed sorts of icen parallelopipeds, not orthogonal. Does anyone still use those?
The dimensions of the Ka‘bah are roughly 30’ x 40’ x 50’. Although its name literally means ‘cube’, it too is a paralellopiped.
Recall Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct with her icepick. Too stylish to use cubes, she stabbed blocks of ice to make irregular ice shards.