Sleet is half-frozen rain that stings as it falls. Driving sleet, turned to sleet, sleet and rain.
In British usage sleet is a mixture of rain and partly melted snow; in American usage it means ice pellets, which is a different thing entirely, and the two meet in forecasts to nobody's benefit. It falls when snow melts on the way down and does not quite finish. Note that sleet is the least popular form of precipitation by a wide margin, because it combines the cold of snow with the wet of rain.
1nounsleetHalf-frozen rain that stings as it falls.
“Icy sleet stung our faces as we walked home from the bus stop.”
sleet is a form of precipitation.
Old English slete is Germanic and related to a Norse word for the same thing. It is one of the small group of weather words English kept from its own stock rather than borrowing.
Old Norse
slydda
Proto-Germanic
*slautijǭ — sleet
Proto-West Germanic
*slautijā
Old English
*slēte
Middle English
slete
English, today
sleet
From Middle English slete, probably from Old English slēte, slȳte, slīete, from Proto-West Germanic slautijā, from Proto-Germanic slautijǭ (“sleet”). Walter W. Skeat, the author of Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, suggests Old Norse slydda (whence Danish slud (“mixture of rain and snow”)). The word appears to be akin to Low German Sloot (“hail”), dialectal German Schloße (“large hailstone”), gmq-ogt sloyta (“slush, sleet”). a doublet of slut.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Nature & Weather, Weather & Seasons