Word.ws English Dictionary

Indian corn

Indian corn noun: maize.

indian corn: maize
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Noun

Indian corn (uncountable)

  1. (uncommon) Maize.
    • But alass! these, when they had maize (yt is, Indean corne) they thought it as good as a feast, and wanted not only for 5. days togeather, but some time 2. or 3. months togeather, and neither had bread nor any kind of corne.1623, William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
    • Every house has a garden. Many meadows, like those in England, are enclosed with three rails, lying one above the other; Indian corn is cultivated in the fields; the grass was dry and withered.1828, Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, chapter IV, in Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826, volume 1, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey
  2. A variety of maize in which the kernels are variously coloured, rather than being all of the same colour.
  3. A variety of candy corn that contains chocolate in addition to honey-based candy.

Indian corn meaning in Tamil

Indian corn in Tamil

மக்காச்சோளம், சோளம்

Examples of Indian corn in a sentence

  • Here and there an effort had been made to clear the land, and something like a field had been marked out, where, among the stumps and ashes of burnt trees, a scanty crop of Indian corn was growing.1842 December – 1844 July, Charles Dickens, chapter 23, in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Chapman and Hall, […]...
  • Put them in; and after the whole has boiled three hours at least, take four ears of young Indian corn, and having grated off all the grains, add them to the soup and boil it an hour longer.1857, Eliza Leslie, “Autumn soup”, in Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book, Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson:
  • It was a sort of scene which Adam had beheld almost weekly for years; […] he knew exactly how many grains were gone out of the ear of Indian corn that hung from one of the rafters; […].1859, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXI, in Adam Bede […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh; London...
  • In the hot days of summer, over against the dark forest the bright green of our little patch of Indian corn rippled in the wind.1904 May, Winston Churchill, The Crossing, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, book I (The...

Synonyms of Indian corn

Origin of Indian corn

From Indian + corn. Since the early 17th century. Before the Columbian Exchange, the English word corn meant any of various cereal grains, with usage much like the word grain is often used today. When maize, a New World crop, was introduced to English-speakers, they called it Indian corn as a natural term for "the kind of corn (grain) that comes from the Indies." The notion of the geography was very fuzzy at the time for most Europeans; most English speakers at the time did not have a clear notion that the East Indies and the West Indies were not the same thing or adjacent portions of one thing, so the word Indies encompassed vast overseas scope. Eventually English-speakers in North America came to use the word corn to mean maize when not otherwise specified, and they came to use the term Indian corn to mean a certain fancy type of maize.

Words formed from Indian corn

Questions about Indian corn

What does Indian corn mean?
Indian corn means maize.
What is Indian corn in Tamil?
Indian corn in Tamil is மக்காச்சோளம், சோளம். See Indian corn meaning in Tamil.
How do you use Indian corn in a sentence?
Here and there an effort had been made to clear the land, and something like a field had been marked out, where, among the stumps and ashes of burnt trees, a scanty crop of Indian corn was growing.
What part of speech is Indian corn?
Indian corn is a noun.

Words near Indian corn in the dictionary

  1. Indian cobra
  2. Indian cobras
  3. Indian coffee plum
  4. Indian coral tree
  5. Indian coral trees
  6. Indian corn
  7. Indian courser
  8. Indian cress
  9. Indian darter
  10. Indian darters
  11. Indian Defence

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Indian corn (page history and authors); indian corn (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-Indian corn.wav.

Cite this entry: “Indian corn.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/indian_corn. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.