Maize

How to spell maize

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce maize

What does maize mean?

1. nounA tall cereal plant grown for its large yellow grain, also called corn; the grain itself.

Maize in a sentence

• The farmer planted several fields of maize this spring.

• Flour ground from maize is used to make tortillas and polenta.

Where does maize come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Maize came into English in the 1550s from the Spanish maíz, which the Spanish had taken directly from mahiz, a word in the Taíno language of the Arawak people of the Caribbean. When Columbus and the early Spanish arrived in the New World, they had no name for the tall grain the islanders cultivated, so they simply adopted the local word. The literal Taíno sense was just the name of the staple cereal plant itself. The spelling settled with a final -ze that mirrors the Spanish pronunciation, and that ending is exactly what separates it from its sound-alike, the puzzle 'maze', which is an unrelated native English word. Today British and Commonwealth writers tend to call the crop maize, while in North America the same plant is more often simply called corn.

How the word is built

• maize (a single unanalysable root borrowed whole; no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like maize

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• maze: A complex, confusing network of paths or passages designed so that finding the way through is difficult.