tapioca

Noun

tapioca (countable and uncountable, plural tapiocas)

1. A starchy food made from the cassava plant, used in puddings.
   • Fish eyes and glue we used to call the half-cooked, large-grained, starchy tapioca without flavour that we were served every week in our residence at university. How I longed for the creamy pudding Mother used to make.2009, Edna Staebler, Food That Really Schmecks, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, →ISBN, page 286
   • It happened when beverage aficionados learned that tapioca, the starch used to make the sweet, round, chewy black bubbles — or pearls — that are the featured topping in the popular boba tea drink, was in short supply.2021 April 16, Kellen Browning, “Another Unlikely Pandemic Shortage: Boba Tea”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

   Synonyms:

   cassava, manioc

2. The cassava plant, Manihot esculenta, from which tapioca is derived; manioc.
   • When the entire coast-line becomes a sea of waving palms, with Chinese and Malay villages fringing the shores, which are at present mere barren wastes of mangroves, with plantations of pepper, of gambier, and of tapioca and rice, the Northern Territory, backed up by the unswerving energy of the...1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 270