Other forms: icicles
An icicle is the hanging spike of frozen drip under a winter roof. A row of icicles, break off an icicle, icicles forming.
It forms where meltwater runs off and refreezes at the edge, which needs sun on the roof and cold air below — so icicles are a sign of heat escaping through the roof as much as of cold weather. Large ones are genuinely dangerous when they fall. Note that the -icle ending looks Latin but is not: it is the Old English ickle, meaning an icicle, with ice added in front.
1nounicicleA hanging spike of frozen drip.
“Long icicles hung from the edge of the roof after the freezing night.”
icicle is a formation of ice.
Old English isgicel is ice plus gicel, itself meaning an icicle — so the word says icicle twice. The ending was later reshaped to look like the Latin -icle in article and particle.
Proto-West Germanic
*īsajikil
Old English
*īsġicel
Middle English
isykle
English, today
icicle
From Middle English isykle, isikel, from Old English īsġicel, from Proto-West Germanic īsajikil, īsajekul, equivalent to ice + ickle. It was assimilated to nouns in -icle, from -culus—the expected spelling would have -ickle. Cognate with stq Iesjuukel (“icicle”), German Low German Iesjökel, dialectal Danish jisegel (“icicle”), Norwegian isjukel (“icicle”) and ovd aisikkel.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA