Having been pelted with one or the other several times now during this horrible winter … can anyone tell me which is which?
I am not a weatherman, but a northeasterner. . .
So far as I know, freezing rain is liquid until it hits a surface and then freezes, while sleet it little pellets of ice before it hits the ground.
Sleet begins its fall from the clouds as rain, with the droplets freezing on the way down as they pass through colder air - that gives you those little round pellets. Freezing rain falls all the way as rain, but freezes upon contact with a cold surface, like a roadway… contributing to the joy that is black ice.
is little pellets.
Sorry, my brain was frozen.
Dang, too slow. 
What about hail?
I’m no meteorologist, but according to this site freezing rain occurs when snowflakes passing through a warm layer of air melt before they hit the ground, then pass again through another, very thin, cold layer of air and become supercooled. When the supercooled liquid drops hit the ground, they instantly freeze. Sleet happens when the falling snowflakes melt, then pass through a deep enough layer of cold air to re-freeze solid before they land, becoming round ice pellets that bounce when they hit the ground.
Its a race between sunfish and me.
With hail, the pellets keep getting blown upward in updrafts, at which time they get recoated with freezing water, getting larger and larger each time.
Hail is a different creature.
During storms with strong updrafts, droplets of water may begin to fall from a cloud only to be blown up to high, colder altitudes, where the droplets freeze. The frozen droplets fall again into warmer levels where they become covered with moisture, only to be blown higher again by the updrafts where the new coating of moisture then also freezes. Essentially, this process gets repeated and the frozen droplet gets bigger and bigger until it is too heavy to be lifted any more by the updrafts, and it falls as hail.
Very strong storms like tornados have powerful updrafts that can continue the accretion/freezing cycle for a long time, producing the baseball-sized hail that makes the news. If you were to slice on of these large pieces of hail open, you would be able to see the concentric layers of ice.
Waaah, no fair, VernWinterbottom - the board wouldn’t let me post!
So, if I’m understanding correctly, if freezing rain hits your skin, it will still be liquid, but sleet will be solid?
Yup, that’s right. Not to say that the rain isn’t going to feel mighty cold, though.
Sleet sucks.
Freezing rain blows.
Hail does both.
You’re welcome.
That’s one way, but freezing rain can also occur when the precipitation starts off as water droplets and not ice crystals. Recently, there was a heavy ice storm along the Atlantic coast (not right on the coast south of NC because it was too warm). What happened then was that there was warm air over the Atlantic, but a cold air mass moving down below it. So in the areas where the temperature was below freezing, the rain would freeze upon contact. Sleet can also occur if the precipitation (starting off as rain and not necessarily starting off as snow) freezes while falling.
Although the link gives a schematic indicating that the precip starts off as snow, the definition given is not limited to that situation:
Note that snow, sleet, and freezing rain occur in the winter, while hail almost always appears in the summer (I have seen it once in the winter, but that was highly unusual). In order to form hail, you need some serious updrafts, and these are supplied by thunderstorms, which are much more likely in the summer.
Minor clarification. Tornadoes have nothing to do with hail production, per se. Updraft speeds are based on the amount of instability present in the environment, which is based on the temperature/moisture profile of a vertical column. More instability, faster updrafts, and the potential for bigger hail. Granted, tornadoes can sometimes form in storms with a high instability, but you don’t need tornadoes for giant hail production, and vice versa.
Yes, that’s true. I was just thinking of tornados as an example to get across some general sense of the storm strength that might be involved. If I had just said severe thunderstorms, I have the feeling someone would have popped in to ask how severe is severe enough for hail (although I’m sure Mid-westerners already have a pretty good grip on that 
).