In Norwegian, we have "isvann" - ice water - which can both mean water implied to be cold enough to feel like it has recently melted, or specifically water with ice in it.

If you're asking for isvann at a restaurant, you'd expect to get water with ice, not just very cold water.

But if you're talking about having gone bathing in isvann one spring, it specifically means in water that - whether or not there is actually ice in it - is cold enough that it might have recently melted.

(I'm a native speaker, but had to look up the precise nuance there to be sure I wasn't just making stuff up)

We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.

While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.

This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.

You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.

This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.

It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.

> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.

I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling.

I can see why some languages may have a separate word for one of these concepts to avoid some of the ambiguity.

I'm not a fan of extending the language with new words unless they are compound (with or without spaces) but extending the dictionaries with more and better descriptions is a no-brainer, there's a lot missing from them.