ice crystals
Americanplural noun
Etymology
Origin of ice crystals
First recorded in 1840–50
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
As water froze, growing ice crystals would push dissolved molecules into the remaining liquid, concentrating them in small spaces.
From Science Daily • Apr. 29, 2026
They're subjected to very low temperatures to freeze the internal moisture into solid ice crystals, and then they are moved to a vacuum chamber.
From BBC • Dec. 5, 2025
Invented in 1946 by General Electric scientists in upstate New York, cloud seeding works because silver iodide particles resemble ice crystals.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 4, 2025
While natural ice crystals in clouds are much larger than the silica particles used in the lab, the team hopes that understanding these small-scale effects will reveal the larger processes that create lightning.
From Science Daily • Nov. 24, 2025
It had been frozen solid, but the ice crystals were already melting.
From "The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm" by Nancy Farmer
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
