The origins and form of this verb are obscure. The verb is only attested once, in a 15th-century manuscript of Bibbeswoth's Tretiz de Langage. The text clearly refers to a meteorological event, a mix of rain, ice, and snow, hence the gloss 'to sleet'. However, the Middle English gloss snowblond may have been understood as 'snowblind' by the editor of the 1929 edition and glossed as 'affecter de niphablepsie?' ('suffering from snow blindness?', see BIBB Owen 166; also FEW aveugle and DEAF triceler). The Middle English compound can be interpreted as a combination of 'snow' and 'blender', i.e. a mixture of snow, hail and rain. The AND also has the entry cricele, attested only once in Nominale, a text that was based up on Bibbeswoth's Tretiz, glossed by the Middle English rayne. This substantive suggests that the verb can also be read as criceler and be considered as deviants for *grisilon, 'hail' (FEW 16,86b var cressiller, AND gresil and gresiller). However, this theory is less likely because of the manuscript's use of the spellings gresle (for gresil) and grele (for gresiller ind. pr. P3) two lines above triceler. Furthermore, the verb and the noun seem to refer to two different weather phenomena according to their respective Middle English translations ('rain' for cricele, 'melted-snow' for triceler), complicating their semantic interpretation and relation.