Corn

How to spell corn

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce corn

What does corn mean?

1. nounA cereal crop; in American usage the plant maize, and in British usage cereal grain such as wheat or oats.
2. nounA small area of hard, thickened skin, usually on a toe, caused by pressure or friction.

Corn in a sentence

• The farmer harvested the corn before the autumn rain set in.

• The tight shoes left a painful corn on her little toe.

• She boiled an ear of corn and spread it with butter.

• The chiropodist gently filed down the corn on his heel.

Where does corn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Corn comes straight from Old English corn, a native Germanic word meaning 'grain' or 'seed', and it has cousins right across the Germanic family, including German Korn and Dutch koren. The deeper root is the Proto-Indo-European base that also gave Latin granum, the source of English 'grain' and 'kernel', so corn and kernel are distant relatives that both trace back to the idea of a small hard seed. For centuries in Britain the word simply meant whatever cereal was the local staple, which is why old laws spoke of the 'Corn Laws' covering wheat, barley and oats rather than maize. When English speakers reached the Americas they applied corn to the new crop maize, and in American usage corn now means that plant specifically. The unrelated foot ailment, a small hard patch of thickened skin, came separately through Old French corn from Latin cornu meaning 'horn', a reference to its hardness, and the spellings simply converged.

How the word is built

• corn (Old English corn: grain, seed)