That awkward moment of anxiety when you just can’t remember a word you should know and there’s no cognate that can save you! I just couldn’t for the sake of me remember how to say ‘ice’ in French; I knew it wasn’t a cognate to Portuguese gelo (or to Spanish hielo, for that matter), but I couldn’t remember the Italian word either, and that I did guess was a cognate to the French word! What a bummer… The obvious (but disappointing) solution was to look it up after all – French glace and Italian ghiaccio.
The Italian and the French words derive from Latin glacies (‘ice’), while the Portuguese and the Spanish words come from Latin gelu (‘frost’, ‘chill’); both, however, are ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (‘cold’).
By the way, French has gel and Italian has gelo, but the meaning is still the same as in Latin.
Fortress of Solitude IV 