Little Ice Age
Little Ice Age proper noun: a period of cooling (not a true ice age) that followed the Medieval Warm Period and continued from about 1300 to about 1850.
Proper noun
the Little Ice Age
- A period of cooling (not a true ice age) that followed the Medieval Warm Period and continued from about 1300 to about 1850.
- The Little Ice Age that chilled Europe–variously dated from 1250 to 1900 or 1550 to 1850–should, according to past precedents, have snowballed into a full-blown ice age.2012, Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne, The Last Lost World, Penguin, →ISBN
- They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.[2021 July 5, Alice Bell, “Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)”, in The Guardian, retrieved 05 Jul 2021
- Synonyms:
- LIA
Synonyms of Little Ice Age
Origin of Little Ice Age
From little + ice age, coined by Dutch-American topographer and geologist François E. Matthes in 1939.
Questions about Little Ice Age
- What does Little Ice Age mean?
- Little Ice Age means a period of cooling (not a true ice age) that followed the Medieval Warm Period and continued from about 1300 to about 1850.
- What part of speech is Little Ice Age?
- Little Ice Age is a proper noun.
Words near Little Ice Age in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Little Ice Age (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “Little Ice Age.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/little_ice_age. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.