The Great Debate: Ice Tea or Iced Tea?

Okay, I admit it, so stay with me on this one -- sometimes, with all of the seriousness going on in the world, we want a little break from all of that. So when I saw this question being posed online, it was actually a nice distraction. I get it, we are not going to solve the world's problems with this question, but it is fun nonetheless.

The question is: do you say Ice Tea or Iced Tea?

Believe it or not, no one really knows which is correct, although according to really smart people, both are okay to say. On a recent episode of Shawn and Sue on 92.7 WOBM, they had discussed summertime drink preferences, and Shawn said that he prefers Iced Tea -- which, when I heard it, made me think of the online debate.

In a recent, surprisingly comprehensive poll done by yougov.com, the results came out looking like this: 49% of us say 'ICED Tea," 20% say "ICE Tea," and 27% don't really care one way or the other (and a few percentage points of people were confused as to why we need a survey for this in the first place.)

As you can see in the chart above, it doesn't really matter which part of the country you are in; every region, for the most part, says the same thing.

However, the chart below shows that younger people prefer to say "ICED Tea" at a lower percentage than older folks. Specifically, 44% of 18-29 year-olds prefer "ICED Tea" compared to 55% in the older group. No reasons were given for this; maybe older people grew up saying it this way, and it was a more popular drink among the older generation (zero data to back that up, just some fun and speculative ICED Tea peer talk!)

Wrapping up the great debate, as I feverishly looked into the results (not really), I found out that this isn't the first time we've had a debate between "ICED" and "ICE." It seems something similar happened with "ice cream" and "ice water," too. They used to be called "iced cream" and "iced water," but now nobody really says "iced cream" anymore, right? So, this is nothing new, just a fun curiosity!

Oh, when I was polling family members about their preferences, my Midwestern mom added this thought-provoking gem. She said, "If you freeze tea in ice trays, you get ice tea, but if you add ice to tea, you get iced tea." Okay, that makes some sense, right?" Then she followed up with, "Water is water, regardless of whether it's frozen or not. Frozen water is ice, and water with ice is ice water." I'm following, I think. Although she had no rationale regarding ice cream. Who knew so much thought went into it?

Now, when asked, my mother-in-law simply responded with "Long Island Ice Tea." Now, that's a whole other article!

Now back to more serious things.