The original phrase is iced tea, and this version is still more common in print. Yet for most English speakers, ice tea more closely resembles our pronunciation. Other terms have undergone this shift; for example, ice cream and ice water were originally iced cream and iced water. But for some reason, those terms lost the d in print while iced tea has not.
This is beginning to change. A few publications use ice tea at least some of the time—for example:
They’ll be welcomed with lemonade, ice tea or a smoothie … [Globe and Mail]
There was no crime here, just oodles of ice tea and raw carrot. [Telegraph]
But others are still using iced tea—for example:
A suspect who swiped a $2 bottle of iced tea and used it to wash down a stolen 50-cent piece of sausage… [New York Daily News]
Minusha drinks homemade mint/blueberry-pomegranate iced tea and doesn’t butter her corn. [Toronto Star]
Neither iced tea nor ice tea is right or wrong, so use whichever seems best to you.
