glacier: [18] Latin glaciēs meant ‘ice’ (it probably came from Indo-European *gel- ‘cold’, which also produced English cold and Latin gelidus ‘cold’). Its Vulgar Latin descendant was *glacia, which passed into French as glace (whence English glacé ‘iced, crystallized’ [19]). A derivative glacière was used in Frenchspeaking areas of the Alps for a ‘moving mass of ice’. It later became glacier, the form in which English borrowed it. Glacial [17] comes from the Latin derivative glaciālis. => cold, glance, jelly
1744, from French glacier (16c.), from Savoy dialect glacière "moving mass of ice," from Old French glace "ice," from Vulgar Latin *glacia (source also of Old Provençal glassa, Italian ghiaccia), from Latin glacies "ice" (see glacial). The German Swiss form gletscher also was used in English (1764).
