Giant planet
The rather misleading term has caught on because planetary scientists typically use rock, gas, and ice as shorthands for classes of elements and compounds found on planets, whatever the actual phase of matter. In the outer Solar System, hydrogen and helium are referred to as gases; water, methane, and ammonia as ices; and silicates and metals as rock. When deep planetary interiors are considered, it may not be far off to say that, by ice astronomers mean oxygen and carbon, by rock they mean silicon, and by gas they mean hydrogen and helium. The many ways in which Uranus and Neptune differ from Jupiter and Saturn have led some to use the term only for the planets similar to the latter two. With this terminology in mind, some astronomers have started referring to Uranus and Neptune as ice giants to indicate the predominance of the ices (in fluid form) in their interior composition.