Today I Learned

I've never heard of winter mix. What you describe I've always heard and called sleet. Anyone I know of in the West has called it sleet. If ice pellets were falling it would be called an ice storm, not A mixture of snow and rain.

In some part because weather isn't the same in all English speaking countries.

A lot of the world doesn't get a significant amount of what Americans call "sleet", it's either mixed in with, or the brief transition between, rain and snow. The quirk of having the huge landmass of Canada up in the North, the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the South, and no East-West mountains to keep them separated means we get huge masses of moist warm tropical air lifted high above dense cold yet dry polar air, that tropical moisture condenses and falls through that polar air and has enough time to freeze on the way down, completely and continuously for long periods of time.

Subjectively, sleet is snow's dipshit loser brother. Snowfall is silent, in fact it's silencing, it's like it sucks the sound out of the world. Sleet hisses like rain on fast forward, it's almost like pink noise. Sleet is denser than snow; an inch of sleet is more precipitation than an inch of snow; it has less surface area so it's harder to melt and it's heavier, so it's harder to move.

Not to be confused with hail, which is frozen precipitation that occurs paradoxically in the summer in vicinity of severe thunderstorms. Convective activity catches precipitation and throws it very high into the atmosphere where the temperatures are cold, so it freezes. This happens over and over again until it is either too large to be lifted again or it gets thrown clear and lands some distance from the storm. The major threat from hail is impact damage.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sleet so not the version I grew up with.

Wintry mix, though, feels like a newer word to me. I don't recall hearing it in the '80s, but maybe I just don't remember it. Even the '90s, I'm not sure. Definitely at some point in the '00s, though.

Sleet to me (central Ohio, USA from birth until my mid-20s) is wind-driven chunks. It is not the same as "freezing rain" in any cases that I can think of, but there might be a small overlap on that venn diagram. I would say "wintry mix" these days, but I'm probably equally likely to say "a mix of snow and rain" or something.

Sleet is like raining slush in the us too. That was the only definition I knew of.

I think they split the two terms apart sometime in the last 30 years. I remember before "winter mix" was used

You are missing a piece of information, the British use of the term sleet predates the formation of the USA.

In Spain "coger" means to take something. In most south American countries that same verb means to fuck.

Um, no. Hail is the frozen pellets. Sleet is the wintery icy mix. US.

Don't forget hominy snow in the south.

Come to think of it, I've never really bothered thinking about what sleet is. I've always just put it in the "you know it when you see it" category.

If I pummel my brain for what I would describe it as, I'd say it's wet, heavy snow in a wind. Like "really soft hail" I suppose.

But yeah...I never bothered. Interesting thought experiment for myself.

Wild to assume the entire US agrees on much of anything.

Im here in the Midwest and sleet here is anything with a gas station slushy consistency as it's falling. It's slush on the ground, but sleet in the air.

I would call the frozen raindrop thing hail and the snowy watery thing sleet. I'm from the UK.

Sleet for me is what you call "wintry mix"

Where I'm at in the NW US, the icy pellets are called 'graupel', the slushy snow/rain is "sleet". Sometimes the weather guys call it "wintry mix" but I haven't heard it outside that.

As someone from the U.S. I have never heard of "wintry mix". I currently live on the west coast, but I always grew up that wet mix of snow/rain/water on the ground as "slush". Each country has its own regional dialects

In US Pacific Northwest and never in my life have I heard of "ice pellets" or "wintry mix"