Meaning & use
ice age
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Meanings
nouncountabletechnical
A long period in Earth's history when the planet was much colder and large areas were covered by ice.
Grammar: Countable: you can say an ice age or several ice ages.
Patterns
- an ice age
- during the ice age
- the last ice age
Scientists say the last ice age ended about twelve thousand years ago.
During the ice age, huge sheets of ice covered much of northern Europe.
Mammoths lived in Europe and Asia during the ice age.
nounsingularfigurativeinformal
A time when a place becomes extremely cold, or a period of little activity in business or politics.
Grammar: Used figuratively and usually with the: the ice age in the housing market.
Patterns
- an ice age in something
Sales fell so sharply that people called it an ice age for the car industry.
The office felt like an ice age after they turned off the heating.
Word forms
| plural | ice ages |
|---|
Common combinations
- the last ice age
- The last ice age shaped the valleys we see today.
- the ice age ended
- When the ice age ended, forests spread north again.
- during the ice age
- Woolly rhinos roamed Europe during the ice age.
- an ice age begins
- An ice age begins when summers are too cool to melt the winter snow.
- the ice age period
- The ice age period lasted tens of thousands of years.
Synonyms and how they differ
- glacial period
- A more technical term for a cold stretch within an ice age; use it in scientific writing rather than everyday speech.
- Ice Age
- Often capitalized when it refers to the most recent one, as in 'the Ice Age'.
Opposites
Word family
- glacier noun
- A slow-moving mass of ice on land, typical of an ice age.
- glacial adjective
- Relating to ice or glaciers, or extremely cold.
- interglacial adjective
- Describing a warmer period between ice ages.
Commonly confused: ice age or iceberg?
ice age vs iceberg
An iceberg is a single floating block of ice in the sea, not a long cold period in Earth's history.
Practice
Which sentence uses 'ice age' correctly?
Choose one answer.
'Ice age' means a long cold period in Earth's history, so it fits a sentence about lasting thousands of years. The other options treat it as a small object you can put somewhere, which is wrong; the frozen cubes are 'ice cubes' or just 'ice'.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “ice age”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.