ice giantn.

1832 Encycl. Americana IX. 317/1 The drops [of ice] became living by the power of him who had sent the wind; and from them sprang Ymir, the ice-giant.

1882 M. Lockwood tr. F. Lenormant Beginnings of Hist. viii. 442 The three sons of Borr, Othin, Wili, and We, grandsons of Buri, the first man, slay Ymir, the father of the Hrimthursar or Ice giants, and his body serves them for the construction of the world.

1965 P. Beardsworth tr. P. Grimal Larousse World Mythol. 362/2 With the ice-giant's bushy eyebrows the gods built the ramparts of their own abode, which they called the Midgard.

2005 D. Keding & A. Douglas Eng. Folktales 208 The bright gods of Asgard from Norse mythology..were constantly battling the Ice Giants.

1976 L. Niven World out of Time iii. 57 The fifth planet was an unknown, an ice giant in a drunken skewed orbit.

1987 Icarus 69 260/2 The core-dominated compositions of Uranus and Neptune suggest possible qualitative differences between the formation of these ice giant planets and the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.

1996 Sky & Telescope Sept. 38/3 The two blue ‘ice giants’ are probably unfinished versions of the more massive gas giants and likely retain chemical clues to planetary beginnings that are lost in their larger siblings.

2006 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 5 Oct. a23/4 Astronomers now had found in the Milky Way all the types of planets that are in..our solar system: gas giants..ice giants..and rocky ‘super-Earths’ orbiting other stars.