I would have agreed with you before they pointed out that "frozen water" gets a word: ice. Honestly, I think it's reasonable: people deal with frozen water far more than they do boiling water, but it changes it from a case of "what are they talking about?" to "okay, where do we draw the line?" for me.

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uhhhhhhh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, being pedantic, my favorite hobby:

Frozen water represents a state change and that different state commonly gets its own word: ice/water/steam equates to solid/liquid/gas

Boiling/freezing water represents the state of the liquid, not the transition. Its descriptive. Water boils away into steam, or freezes into ice.

Should we consider luke-warm water also singular? What about body-temperature water? cool water? It makes sense not to treat adjectives/descriptive words combined with the subject as singular because the definition already exists in the root of the words (meaning of adjective word + meaning of subject word). Blue clay is another example, why would that be a singular?

It really only makes sense to me in the rare cases where the combination words represent something different or non obvious than the combined meanings of the two words (i.e to 'give up')

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dghf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam.

As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice.

So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.

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epolanski 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Freezing water is already at or below 0, it doesn't need to get "colder" to turn into ice, it simply needs to exchange the energy with the environment and rearrange in crystals.

Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder.

But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.

	▲	Someone an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder. > But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals Water at freezing temperature can get much colder without freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling: “Water normally freezes at 273.15 K (0.0 °C; 32 °F), but it can be "supercooled" at standard pressure down to its crystal homogeneous nucleation at almost 224.8 K (−48.3 °C; −55.0 °F).”
	▲	306bobby an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes, is that not the same with boiling water? It doesn't need to get "hotter" to turn to steam, it needs to exchange the energy with the environment to gasify
	▲	dghf an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So, I got the physics wrong. Apologies and thanks for the correction. But the semantic point still stands. Boiling water is still water -- in the specific sense of H2O in its liquid state -- while ice is not. The complaint that frozen water has a single-word synonym while boiling water does not is making a false equivalence.

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NiloCK 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Steam?